Smaller metropolitan areas had the highest cultural workforce increase over the past dozen years (populations between 220,000 and 500,000)
Part 3 of my series: Local trends in the arts, culture, and heritage workforce between 2013 and 2025
Today I continue my series of articles analyzing local statistics on workers in arts, culture, heritage, and some sport occupations with a study of individual and group changes between 2013 and 2025 for 10 CMAs with populations between 220,000 and 500,000: Abbotsford-Mission, Barrie, Kelowna, Oshawa, Regina, Saskatoon, Sherbrooke, St. John’s, Victoria, and Windsor. For context, I’ll include an analysis of the Canada-wide change between 2013 and 2025.
Two weeks ago, I examined the trends for Canada, the 31 CMAs (as a group), and the 6 largest CMAs: Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto, and Vancouver. Last week, I examined changes for 7 CMAs with populations between 500,000 and 1 million: Winnipeg, Quebec City, Hamilton, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, London, Halifax, and St. Catharines-Niagara.
Next week, I’ll examine the smallest CMAs, i.e., the 8 with populations under 200,000: Fredericton, Greater Sudbury, Guelph, Kingston, Moncton, Peterborough, Saint John, and Trois-Rivières.
These articles are based on publicly available occupation statistics from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). As was the case in my other articles, I have created three-year averages to provide a higher level of statistical reliability and minimize the impact of unusual single year estimates in many CMAs. The data in this article labelled 2025 therefore represent the average for 2023-2025. The earliest data point (labelled 2013) is actually the average for 2011-2013.
Key things to know about the Labour Force Survey
In my opinion, data from the Labour Force Survey are useful but imperfect for analyzing the labour force in the arts, culture, and heritage. I outline many limitations at the end of this article and in even greater detail here.
Because of its relatively small sample size, the Labour Force Survey can only offer reliable local data for a broad category of arts, culture, heritage, and sports workers. The summary data relate to what Statistics Canada calls “occupations in the arts, culture, recreation, and sports, except management”. I will generally call this occupation category “arts, culture, heritage, and sport workers”. Details about the occupation groupings within this category are at the end of this article.
Most of the people in this category (roughly 75%) work in the arts, culture, and heritage (rather than sports and recreation). The category covers approximately 60% of all workers in the arts, culture, and heritage.
The data are available for CMAs, not for municipalities per se.
Given the Labour Force Survey’s limitations, the analysis that follows is relatively simple: I examine whether the number of workers in the selected occupation grouping has increased or decreased over 12 years or so.
26% increase for all of Canada
Between 2013 and 2025, there was a 26% increase in the number of workers in the arts, culture, heritage, and sport in Canada (estimates of 510,000 in 2013 and 641,000 in 2025).
49% increase in the 10 CMAs, the highest increase among all CMA groups
3.3 million people, or 8% of Canada’s population, reside in the 10 CMAs that have populations between 220,000 and 500,000.
7% of all Canadian workers in the arts, culture, heritage, and sport (47,000 people) reside in these 10 CMAs, a percentage that is very close to the CMAs’ share of the population.
Between 2013 and 2025, the 49% increase in number of workers in the arts, culture, heritage, and sport in the 10 CMAs is the highest among the four groups of CMAs analyzed in this series of articles and is nearly double the Canadian average (26%). While the number of workers increased most years (except 2020 to 2022), a very large increase has occurred since 2022, as shown in the following graph. Collectively, in the 10 CMAs, there were 31,000 workers in this occupation grouping in 2013 and 47,000 in 2025.
All 10 CMAs saw increases in the number of workers in the arts, culture, heritage, and sport, but 3 of the CMAs had increases that were below the national average (26%).
Details follow for each of the 10 CMAs, from largest to smallest.