Highly artistic municipalities in Canada

Including a nuanced comparison of artists in the country’s three largest cities

I have to clarify something right off the top: this post provides a limited view of “highly artistic municipalities”. It’s based on census counts of professional artists, not a qualitative assessment of the cool stuff going on in cities, towns, and rural areas across the country.

About a month ago, I posted some key facts about artists in Canada and provided a list of provinces, cities, and towns that have requested a profile of artists in their areas. More recently, I wrote about artists in rural areas and small towns (all of Canada here; provincial analysis here).

I thought that it might be time to broaden the municipal view to compare the number of artists in cities and towns across the country. Today’s analysis covers municipalities of all sizes (with at least 10,000 residents), but I also examine the number and concentration of artists in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. The post provides a comparison of the number of artists in the local labour force but no other details about artists in each municipality.

As per usual, the analysis is based on data that I requested from Statistics Canada’s 2021 long-form census. In my data request, I asked for data on municipalities with a population of at least 10,000. Today’s post includes lower-tier municipalities only, not regions or districts that are comprised of other municipalities. A slight exception to the “lower-tier municipalities” requirement comes from British Columbia, where unincorporated electoral areas with at least 10,000 residents are included as census subdivisions (which is Statistics Canada’s term for municipalities and municipal-like areas). Details about the counting of workers in the census are provided at the end of the article.

Municipalities with strong concentrations of artists

I said this back in 2020 (when analyzing 2016 census data), but it still strikes me as interesting: municipalities of many different sizes have high proportions of artists in the local labour force. There are some municipalities with populations just over 10,000 with lots of artists, relative to their local labour force. Some of the largest cities in the country also have very high concentrations of artists, which means that their counts of artists are very high. And there are some mid-sized cities with lots of artists (per worker).

Which municipalities? Read on …