Arts and culture job counts: Changes since 2019

Data analysis from the second quarter of 2022

After examining job vacancies last week, I am continuing my focus on arts and culture jobs in Canada, with an analysis of the latest statistics from Statistics Canada’s National Culture Indicators, which relate to the second quarter of 2022 (i.e., April through June).

Two key questions are addressed:

• How many jobs are there in specific areas of the arts, as well as overall in the arts, culture, and heritage?

• How do the most recent jobs statistics compare with pre-pandemic levels?

There are nearly 700,000 full-time and part-time jobs in the cultural sector, as of the second quarter of 2022. This is the first quarter where the jobs estimate was above the level at the end of 2019 (but was just 2% higher). The jobs recovery could be described as slow / gradual / halting / incomplete in different areas of the arts.

I’ll look at the estimates of jobs in:

• Visual arts

• Performing arts

• Book publishing

• Film and video

• Sound recording

• The above five sectors combined, which provides our best estimate of the arts as a whole

• The overall cultural sector, encompassing the arts, culture, and heritage

The counts include both full-time and part-time positions and are not expressed on a full-time-equivalent basis. Only Canada-wide statistics are available at this time.

Next week, I’ll examine culture’s direct impact on Gross Domestic Product, using the same data source.

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Visual and performing arts

Jobs in both the visual arts and performing arts were strongly affected by the pandemic, as shown in the graph below.