Which large cities and small municipalities have the best (statistical) conditions for artists?
Plus: Key stats on artists for over 140 municipalities
In Canada, according to my own research, conditions tend to be challenging for artists no matter where they reside. As I’ve noted, artists’ incomes are lower than other workers in every Canadian municipality, even though artists tend to have higher education levels than most other workers.
That’s not to say that conditions are similar in all areas of the country. Today’s post examines large cities and smaller municipalities with a combination of a high concentration of artists in the local labour force and higher median incomes of artists relative to the rest of the local workforce. I’m also providing a downloadable pdf list of the number and median incomes of artists in all 41 large cities and 101 small municipalities.
This post is the third and final part of my analysis of highly artistic municipalities in Canada. The other two looked at the number of artists and their incomes in isolation. This one combines the two measurements while offering a separate analysis of larger and smaller municipalities (larger = more than 1,000 artists; smaller = between 100 and 999 artists).
For today’s analysis, I ranked municipalities two ways: the number of artists as a percentage of the local labour force and artists’ median incomes as a percentage of the median incomes of all local workers. Then I averaged the two ranking numbers to see which municipalities rank relatively highly on both.
Municipalities with the lowest average ranking are mentioned in the text below, while key statistics for over 140 municipalities are available for download.
A practical example: the city that is on top of the large city list is ranked second in terms of the incomes of artists compared with other local workers and fifth in terms of the concentration of artists in the local labour force, for an average ranking of 3.5. Because this is the lowest average ranking, this city is ranked first among large cities.
One final note: there are many ties in the rankings, including among the top three large cities. In these cases, I have unofficially given a higher ranking to the city with the lowest difference in median incomes between artists and all local workers.
The analysis is based on data that I requested from Statistics Canada’s 2021 long-form census, Details about how the census counts workers and their incomes are provided at the end of the article.