CSA Releases Provincial and Territorial Culture Indicators for 2018

Statistics Canada has released updated PTCI stats covering 2018. The PTCI are timely economic estimates of culture and sport in Canada, and were developed as an extension of the more comprehensive Provincial and Territorial Culture Satellite Account (CSA). The PTCI cover culture (including arts and heritage) and sport across Canada in terms of output, nominal gross domestic product (GDP) and jobs. The newly release stats cover 2018.

This year’s PTCI release should be taken in a unique context — while the numbers reflect accurate totals for 2018, the COVID-19 pandemic will have significant impacts that won’t be quantifiable until the release of the 2020 numbers. Regardless, we can pull a few figures from the CSA website.

ARTS AND Culture GDP

Nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of the culture and sport sectors increased across most of the country in 2018, rising by 2.3% to $61.9 billion or 3.0% of the total economy. This compares with growth of 4.0% for the total economy.

Interactive media (+6.9%) and design (+3.5%) continued to exemplify the evolving culture sector in 2018. They have represented a progressively larger share since 2010, amounting to 17.4% of culture GDP in 2018 compared with 12.6% in 2010. The growth was primarily attributable to the design of software, video games, and graphics, as well as software and video game publishers.

The swing to digital was also felt in written and published works, although the change has been more turbulent as publishing industries continue to adapt. Books (-8.7%), periodicals (-10.1%) and newspapers (-13.9%) saw significant declines in 2018. Since 2010, their share of culture GDP has halved from 12.8% to 6.3%.

Overall, the culture sector—which accounted for 90.5% of the total culture and sport GDP—rose 2.2% in 2018.

Employment

Canada's culture and sport sectors' employment rose 0.7% overall to about 750,000 jobs in 2018, accounting for 3.9% of jobs in the economy.

The culture sector accounted for over 655,000 jobs in 2018, a 0.5% increase from 2017. Parallel to culture GDP, books (-7.0%), periodicals (-5.8%) and newspapers (-7.4%) have seen their share of culture jobs steadily decline. The culture share dropped to 6.9% in 2018 from 11.8% in 2010. Interactive media and design have increased their share of culture jobs in that same time period. All provinces posted job gains, except for Ontario (-1,400 jobs) and Quebec (-900 jobs).

Meanwhile, in British Columbia

When we look at the stats for BC, we see that cultural jobs have increased from 98,050 in 2017 to 101,908 in 2018, while the provincial cultural GDP has jumped from approximately $7.1 billion to a little over $7.5 billion — the third highest, behind Ontario and Quebec.

For the full 2018 PTCI, click here.