Provincial and Territorial Cultural Indicators, 2023

The Provincial and Territorial Culture Indicators (PTCI) are timely economic estimates of culture and sport in Canada made possible thanks to a joint initiative of Statistics Canada and a number of partners, including the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, and others.

Research goal

The PTCI are an extension of the Culture Satellite Account (CSA), an accounting framework developed to measure the economic importance of culture (including arts and heritage), and sport to the Canadian economy.

Methods

Data are extracted from administrative files and derived from Statistics Canada surveys and other sources.

Outcomes

Key highlights from the Provincial and Territorial Culture Indicators, 2023 include:

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

• Canada's culture GDP rose 5.2% to $63.2B in 2023, with increases in all domains.
• The largest contributors to this gain were the culture governance, funding, and professional support domain (+$0.9B; +9.5%), visual and applied arts (+$0.7B; +5.2%) and live performance (+$0.4B; +12.7%) domains.
• As a proportion of total economy GDP, culture accounted for 2.3% in 2023, unchanged from 2022.
• The 5 provinces and territories with the highest culture GDP were Ontario ($28.0B, or a 44.2% share of the total culture GDP), Quebec ($13.7B, or a 21.6% share), British Columbia ($10.5B, or a 16.6% share), Alberta ($5.5B, or an 8.8% share) and Manitoba ($1.8B, or a 2.8% share).

Culture Jobs

• Culture jobs increased 2.4% to 669,600 in 2023. Growth was led by job increases in both the visual and applied arts and the live performance domains.

• The share of culture jobs accounted for 3.2% of all jobs in Canada.
• The number of culture jobs increased in all provinces except the Northwest Territories (-4.7%) from 2022 to 2023. Increases ranged from 1.8% (Ontario) to 8.5% (Prince Edward Island).

• The 5 provinces and territories with the highest number of culture jobs were Ontario (267,378 or a 39.9% share of total culture jobs), Quebec (161,624, or a 24.1% share), British Columbia (122,644, or a 18.3% share), Alberta (53,189, or an 7.9% share) and Manitoba (21,344, or a 3.2% share).

Questions?

Please contact the Research, Measurement and Data Analytics Section at research@canadacouncil.ca.