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Canada has lagged in access to capital for high-potential, growth-oriented new ventures, but has made considerable strides in the past decade. This study aims to examine the evolving state of the market for risk capital in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing a critical assessment of government policy from the perspective of angel investors and diverse communities of entrepreneurs.

A thematic analysis was conducted of seven COVID-19 roundtable discussions hosted by the National Angel Capital Organization that included 51 global and national-level business and political leaders. The analysis extracted the most salient details from the discussions, distilling them into timely and actionable insights for policymakers.

The analysis suggests that the government’s economic policy response to the COVID-19 crisis fails to address the sudden liquidity problems faced by new ventures. Entrepreneurs and angel investors have remained resilient, rallied as a community and demonstrated an extraordinary level of trust. Traditionally under-represented communities of entrepreneurs are more affected by the crisis than others.

The findings and recommendations are of relevance to policymakers interested in post-COVID-19 economic policies to address the unique challenges faced by start-ups and ensure their full contribution to economic recovery.

The paper presents several policy recommendations and proposes a novel framework to describe the impacts of the pandemic on different categories of start-ups.

There is now no shortage of complex and expensive database software for business use and information retrieval but not all applications need the full sophistication of a relational programmable package costing close to £1,000. Indeed overkill can be a mistake because big systems do not always do simple tasks well. It is, therefore, worth looking to see what the other end of the spectrum has to offer. The “Key” data handling package is just such a system, intended for use in education and designed to be simple enough for pupils themselves to use. At a cost of only £7.95 (BBC B computer) or £9.95 (Research Machines Nimbus computer) including a 72‐page spiral‐bound handbook, one would not expect much, but in fact the system can record information of up to 255 characters length in a number of varied types of field, store simple drawings associated with the records, and plot positions on a map. Searching is possible for beginnings, endings and part words and is surprisingly fast.

Accounting history has a long tradition, but in recent years it has expanded its interests and approaches. Early literature of accounting history that sought to glorify the practice of accounting and the status of accountants has been supplemented first by a more utilitarian approach viewing the past as a “database” for enhancing understanding of contemporary practice and for identifying past accounting solutions that might be relevant to current problems, and then by a more critical approach, which seeks to understand accounting’s past through the perspective of a range of social and political theories. A tension has developed between those historians whose first loyalty is to the archive and those who look primarily to theory to inform their historical investigations. As accounting history matures, open debate between practitioners of different modes of history making can only be beneficial, not only to the development of the discipline, but also towards our own self‐understandings as accountants, including the impact we have on organizational and social functioning. Suggests that accounting history without a firm archival base is likely to lose direction, but that our notion of what constitutes the archive, and our ways of communicating, explicating and interpreting the archive, should not be taken as fixed. To illustrate this, examines a number of approaches to the writing of accounting history where recent research has begun to demonstrate a critical and interpretive tendency, and suggests directions in which this research might develop as accounting and its history enters the twenty‐first century.