Based on a two-stage survey of Canadian visual artists, this study delves more deeply than any existing reports into visual artists’ sources of revenue, art practice expenses and time use. More than half of all visual artists (56%) lose money on their artistic practice. The report argues that visual artists themselves are the primary funders of artistic practices.
Based on a national survey of 218 arts organizations, this report provides data about salary levels for 21 management and administrative positions in Canadian non-profit arts organizations in 2008. Unfortunately, the report does not provide an estimate of the margin of error, given the number of survey respondents. This is a major limitation on any interpretation of the results.
Statistics Canada’s Satellite Account of Nonprofit Institutions and Volunteering provides information on the economic size and scope of the non-profit sector. Overall, the non-profit sector’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $83 billion in 2004, or about 7% of Canada’s total GDP. (The measure of economic activity in this report differs substantially from the methodology used in estimates of the cultural sector’s economic impact.)
The key goal of the report is to examine cultural occupations in non-cultural sectors of the economy. The report finds that 40% of culture workers are employed in non-cultural sectors, especially four sectors: manufacturing, business services, educational services and retail trade. Between 1991 and 2001, there were two particularly significant growth sectors for creative workers: the manufacturing sector and the business services sector.
The report provides a scan of 20 countries’ policies related to creative workers and artists, including education and training policies, awards and contests, business support and entrepreneurial development, as well as tax and social security policies. “Despite the general assumption that the knowledge economy will produce a labour force which resembles the cultural sector in its core characteristics, most countries have not yet introduced comprehensive creative labour policies to accommodate a more flexible, mobile workforce, and one which is increasingly self-employed.”
This study provides information about professional development practices in Ontario’s cultural sector, including data about “how much training is pursued, the types of training, and who is paying for it”.
The 11 local reports in the Vital Signs series provide some interesting information about the arts in the selected communities. However, because some of the indicators do not follow standard definitions from Statistics Canada or other cultural sector reports, the reports are less useful than they might otherwise be.
This report examines cultural employment in many rural and urban communities using 48 occupational groups from the 2001 Census. The detailed tables in the report’s appendixes may be of particular interest to many readers. The appendixes provide cultural employment levels in a number of communities as well as rankings of “location quotients” and “diversity indexes”.
This report compares cultural employment in Canada and the United States using 21 occupation groups from the Canadian and American censuses. The report finds that, in both Canada and the U.S., “culture employment grew at a much greater rate than the workforce as a whole over the period 1981 to 2001”. The report also finds that the growth in culture employment between 1981 and 2001 was stronger in Canada than in the U.S., resulting in Canada having a larger share of its overall workforce in cultural occupations than the U.S. in 2001.
This report summarizes almost three years of research into the human resource situation of Canadian libraries, including a literature review, telephone interviews, focus group sessions, a mail-in survey of 461 library administrators and managers, and an internet survey of over 2,200 librarians and 2,000 paraprofessionals.
