In a year like no other, the St. John's Board of Trade stepped back from praising the city's best local businesses to celebrate those who have fought and survived a year defined by disease and a history-making blizzard.

"We couldn't count sales or revenues or judge who moved the most product because the circumstances were different," said St. John's Board of Trade's CEO AnnMare Boudreau on Wednesday.

Instead of the usual hardware, the board of trade launched what it called the Business Resilience Awards "so that we could measure business differently and keep pace with what our community needed and how our community was acting."

There was no gala, either. Rather than renting a hotel ballroom, the board of trade organized the event at a studio at Canadian AV and streamed to the group's members. 

Physically distanced because of COVID-19, the event was a fitting way to honour businesses that had to change their way of doing things as well. 

Awards were broken down into five categories: Opportunity Seeker, Boundary Pusher, Service Star, Community Champion and the Overall 2020 Resilience Award. 

PAL Airlines took home the Opportunity Seeker award. The company, despite Snowmageddon in January, managed to add a new route in 2020.

"We saw that there was a gap in Atlantic Canada and that there was a great demand to connect Newfoundland with New Brunswick," said Janine Brown, PAL Airlines' director of business development and sales.