Gallery-goers look at artworks by Dil Hildebrand at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain during Canadian Art Gallery Hop Montreal in April 2015. Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro.
A bulletin today from Hill Strategies asserts that the estimated direct economic impact of Canada’s culture industries (also known as value added or gross domestic product) was $61.7 billion in 2014, or 3.3% of the country’s GDP.
Nationally, the bulletin says, the GDP of culture industries is much larger than the value added of agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting ($29 billion); accommodation and food services ($38 billion); and utilities ($43 billion).
Hill Strategies also notes that estimates of the direct economic impact of culture ($61.7 billion) is 10 times larger than that of sports ($6.1 billion).
Similarly, the jobs estimate in the culture sector (700,100) is almost seven times larger than the estimate for the sports sector (103,700). (The jobs figures include full-time and part-time jobs, while part-year employment is included on a pro-rated basis.)
All of Hill Strategies’s findings are based on Statistics Canada’s Provincial and Territorial Culture Indicators, 2010 to 2014, which were released last month.
From the product perspective, the direct economic impact of culture products was estimated at $54.6 billion in Canada in 2014, or 3 per cent of Canada’s GDP. The employment estimate was 630,500 in 2014, or 3.5 per cent of all jobs in the country. Some key contributors to the culture products GDP include:
Audio-visual and interactive media: $18.4 billion
Visual and applied arts: $11.2 billion
Written and published works: $9.7 billion
Live performance: $2.5 billion
Heritage and libraries: $0.8 billion
Sound recording: $0.6 billion
Hill Strategies notes that an estimate of the value added of the arts (i.e. separate from other cultural and heritage elements) is not possible from the data, since many elements of the arts are combined into broader categories with other cultural and heritage elements.
