During the current period of economic contraction, it is very likely that the ranks of the self-employed will swell once again, and it is critical that we enhance the opportunity for these workers – to the benefit of the individual, region, and provincial economy as a whole. [...] To this end, I first discuss the salient aspects of self-employed work in Ontario’s labour force, the types of sector-based work and the income returns that characterize different types of self-employed workers in the province – based on the occupational skills classes introduced in the Ontario in the Creative Age report: creativity- oriented, routine-service and routine-physical. [...] An opportunity founded on self-employment In the most basic sense, entrepreneurship is the introduction of new activity to the economy, be it through the creation of a novel product or service, or a new way of delivering those that already exist. [...] By the end of the 1960s, just 6 percent of the non- agricultural workforce was classified as self-employed, the lowest national rate of the past 50 years. [...] As with the rest of the country, the provincial self-employment rate peaked during the mid-1990s, and experienced modest decline in the latter part of the decade.