Publicly owned arts, culture, and heritage spaces in Canada’s provinces and territories in 2022
Number and types of spaces, urban / rural split, and condition ratings
In last week’s post, I noted that there are 5,376 arts, culture, and heritage spaces in Canada that are owned by municipal, provincial, and federal governments (excluding spaces owned by First Nations and other Indigenous governments).
Today, I examine the differences in the condition of publicly owned arts, culture, and heritage spaces between the provinces as well as the number of publicly owned cultural facilities in each province and territory.
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Condition ratings of arts, culture, and heritage spaces in each province
The graph below shows the percentage of government owned arts, culture, and heritage spaces in each province that were assessed a condition rating of “very poor”, “poor”, or “fair” by survey respondents. The three lowest condition ratings were combined for the graph:
Very poor: immediate need to replace most or all of the space.
Poor: failure is likely, and substantial work is required in the short term.
Fair: significant deterioration is evident, but the venue is still serviceable and safe.
The statistics are based on all government owned arts, culture, and heritage spaces in each province, including libraries, museums and archives, art galleries, performing arts venues, and Indigenous culture facilities. However, condition ratings were not provided for all publicly owned cultural spaces in all provinces. Some were noted as “condition unknown”. These venues, which were included in the totals (i.e., to get to 100% in the condition ratings), would affect the other percentages.
The condition ratings in the three territories are not analyzed here, because of the small number of government owned spaces in each jurisdiction and the high proportion of venues that were noted as “condition unknown”.