Municipal Culture Indicators from the Culture Statistics Strategy
The City of Ottawa is part of the Culture Statistics Strategy, along with Statistics Canada, Canadian Heritage, the ministries of culture from all 13 provinces and territories, the Creative City Network of Canada (CCNC), dozens of municipalities, and other partners. The purpose is to provide reliable, consistent statistics about the culture sector in Canada. Statistics Canada has worked with this consortium to develop key economic indicators for culture, including culture GDP, jobs, tax revenue, and trade, as well as indicators for Canada’s sports sectors and cultural tourism. These indicators are updated annually for each province and territory. At the national level, Statistics Canada also publishes quarterly GDP and jobs figures for culture and sport in Canada.
Unfortunately, Statistics Canada could not produce the culture economic indicators at the local level, so Canadian Heritage worked with the municipal partners, including the City of Ottawa, to develop a method for estimating local culture and sport GDP and jobs. These are known as the Municipal Culture Indicators.
The method uses the Provincial/Territorial Culture Satellite Account (PTCSA) and the Business Register (BR). The assumption is that cities with more and/or larger firms in the culture sector likely make up a larger share of the provincial or territorial culture GDP.
Using that approach, the OCRG was able to report in Counting on Culture that the culture GDP of Ottawa had been estimated to be more than $3 billion in 2016. Since then, we have continued to work with Canadian Heritage, CCNC, and other municipal CSS partners to refine and update the model. As a result, we can now provide more detailed statistics for GDP and jobs in all culture and sport sectors in Ottawa for each year from 2010 to 2020. 2021 and 2022 statistics will be available later this year.
About the data
There are some aspects of the Municipal Culture Indicators that are important to keep in mind when using these data, including some known issues and limitations of the data. The model remains a ‘work-in-progress’ that requires ongoing verification and refinement.
The culture and sport sectors are divided into domains and subdomains according to the Canadian Framework for Culture Statistics. However, some cultural activity can be difficult to categorize and may fall under multiple domains or subdomains. In the dataset, the category called “multi” includes these activities that do not fit into just one area.
The model assumes that there is homogeneous productivity among firms of all sizes, between the various industries (NAICS) forming culture domains, and between cities of the same province or territory. In reality, economies of scale (or sometimes diseconomies of scale) exist in most industries. Unfortunately, we do not have the data to factor that into the model.
One of the improvements that was made to the model since we published the initial figures in Counting on Culture, was to treat each business location as a separate entity, even if they are part of the same firm. For example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) operates in many different cities across Canada. Our model now assigns CBC employees to the location (city) in which they are based, as opposed to assigning the entire organization to its headquarters. However, many firms also have work that takes place away from their ‘official’ locations. For example, a film company might be based in Toronto but shoot at locations in many different cities and towns where they do not have a fixed address in the BR. As a result, all of that company’s economic activity is attributed to Toronto, when in actual fact a lot of their work is happening elsewhere.
The BR may miss some small businesses or independent artists that do not report any business income on their taxes.
There are some known issues with the Culture Satellite Account, particularly in the Heritage and Libraries Domain. A lot of the work that takes place in libraries and archives is grouped with public administration by Statistics Canada. As culture-related public administration work, it is counted in the Governance, Funding, and Professional Support Domain. As such, it is still included in the overall culture GDP and jobs totals, but not in the Heritage and Libraries Domain where one would expect to find it.
The estimates provided are only for Ottawa and do not include Gatineau and other surrounding communities.
There are now more than 40 Canadian municipalities participating in the CSS. We hope to encourage other communities to share their data to enable comparisons between cities. We are also exploring international partnerships to enable comparisons with cities in other countries.
Comparable local economic indicators for other industries do not exist in Canada. The Conference Board of Canada provides estimates of total GDP for Census Metropolitan Areas (e.g. Ottawa-Gatineau), but not for individual industries or individual municipalities within a Census Metropolitan Area. We hope that other sectors will follow the cultural sector’s lead and develop comparable indicators to enable consistent reporting across Canada.