Cultural Industry: More Jobs than Forestry and Finance, Combined
Here’s an excellent commentary on what the arts contribute to economic life in Canada:
- “I’ll Take Margie Gillis Over a Government Gazebo Any Day,” by Robert Remington in the Calgary Herald.
The following excerpts are particularly incisive:
Harper defended the fake lake at the Toronto G8 media centre as a marketing opportunity. The lake itself only cost $57,000 -$1.9 million was the total cost of the tourism pavilion. The point of it all, he said, was the future economic benefit to Canada and the region.
Of course. That’s why we also invest in the arts. In its July 2008 report, Valuing Culture: Measuring and Understanding Canada’s Creative Economy, the Conference Board of Canada estimated that the economic footprint of Canada’s culture sector was $84.6 billion in 2007, or 7.4 per cent of Canada’s total real GDP, including direct, indirect and induced contributions. Culture sector employment exceeded 1.1 million jobs in 2007, more than the forestry sector (300,000) and banks (257,000). . . .
To use another analogy, the cost of maintaining the royal family is far less than the economic benefit that accrues from it. All those jewels and palaces are expensive, but the tourism potential is immense. Security at the recent royal wedding cost $15 million, but the economic benefit to London was $170 million, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Another cost-benefit analysis pegged the total economic spinoff from the wedding at nearly $1 billion.
The Cultural HR Study 2010 noted that, in 2007, “the full contribution of the combined direct, indirect and induced effects [of the cultural sector] was valued at $84.6 billion, or about 7.4 per cent of total GDP . . . over 1.1 million Canadians.” It also noted that the global recession was expected to hit cultural industry workers harder than others:
Real value-added output, or gross domestic product (GDP), for the Canadian economy is expected to be 4 per cent lower in 2009 than it would have been in the absence of the global recession. In comparison, real value-added output in Canada’s culture sector is expected to be 4.8 per cent lower in 2009 than it would have been had there not been a recession.
Our estimates suggest the global recession is likely to reduce real direct value-added output of Canada’s culture sector by about $2.2 billion in 2009. . . . revenues for Canada’s culture sector are expected to be 4.3 per cent–or about $3.1 billion–lower in 2009 than they would have been in the absence of a global recession.
Moreover, cultural sector workers are typically higher educated and lower paid than workers in many other industries, so paying off Canada student loans, raising a family, and getting a foot in the real estate door was difficult even before the global recession was factored in.
There is a perception out there that this is “just too bad” for cultural industry workers—that writers, editors, musicians, dancers, visual artists, and so on are not working at “real” jobs but sucking funding from Canadian taxpayers, and that fine and commercial artists whose incomes have suffered during the recession just need to “suck it up” and get “real jobs” like everyone else.
Figures like these put the lie to this. The cultural sector contributes enormously to Canada’s economic well-being. When the cultural industry suffers, it has a real impact on the Canadian economy. It’s an impact, and an industry, that needs to be taken a lot more seriously than it is.
