1. The Chamber was often dominated by members of large businesses and institutions.
2. The forum concept had an inherent bias since only bureaucrats and representatives from large corporations were usually available as speakers.
3. Small businesses did not consider it important to be members, and deferred joining until there was “more time” to participate or when they had more money to join the Chamber.
4. The Chamber’ s national executive was often caught up more with the problems of big business, big government, and big labour.
5. While the Chamber considered itself to be widely representative of Canadian business, the membership demographics tended toward retailing and financial services such as banking, legal, and accounting, and often included governmental people.
On the other hand, the second national organization, the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, presumably was seen to represent in the production system. However, it too was often seen as a restricted organization in terms of serving small business interests. First, s membership was predominantly large corporations, most of which were located in Ontario, while numerically the smaller firms, which made up 95 percent of all manufacturing operations in the country, were not statistically represented.