Municipal Cultural Investment

Mon­tréal and Van­cou­ver Lead the Way in Cul­ture Funding

On Jan­u­ary 10^th, Hill Strate­gies Research released a study called Munic­i­pal Cul­tural Invest­ment in Five Large Cana­dian Cities. The study com­pares cities with the largest num­ber of cul­tural work­ers and artists in Canada – Van­cou­ver, Cal­gary, Toronto, Ottawa and Mon­tréal. This report writ­ten in part­ner­ship with the cul­tural staff of the five cities cov­ered, the Cre­ative City Net­work and the Cana­dian Urban Libraries Coun­cil aims to fill a gap in the level of infor­ma­tion pro­vided by Sta­tis­tics Canada by break­ing down the invest­ments by munic­i­pal­ity and types of fund­ing for com­par­i­son between 5 municipalities.

The study com­prises oper­at­ing expen­di­tures, grants and cap­i­tal expen­di­tures in each city between 2006 and 2009 and excludes any funds trans­ferred from other lev­els of gov­ern­ment. So as to com­pare apples to apples, the report presents a sep­a­rate sec­tion on pub­lic library fund­ing because of the dif­fer­ent ways those funds are admin­is­tered in each city.

What are the findings?

• In 2009, the aver­age per capita expen­di­ture for all five cities was $35, with Mon­tréal lead­ing the pack at $55 and Toronto occu­py­ing last place with $19. Ottawa also falls below the aver­age with $28 per capita expenditures.
• It wasn’t always that way though. While in pre­vi­ous years Mon­tréal and Van­cou­ver were up at the front, the other three cities traded places at the bot­tom of the rank­ings. In 2006 Cal­gary and Ottawa were tied for low­est with only 15$ per capita and Toronto occu­pied the mid­dle of the pack with $17.
• Toronto has fallen at the bot­tom due to a mea­ger $2 per capita increase over 4 years com­pared to the high­est increase of $27 in Cal­gary fur­ther to its Munic­i­pal Sus­tain­abil­ity Ini­tia­tive. The other 3 cities have seen a steady increase of $13 to $14 each.
• Despite there being a 197% increase in cap­i­tal expen­di­tures, these still only accounted for 25% of expen­di­tures in 2009. The rest of the expen­di­tures were split nearly equally between grants and oper­at­ing expen­di­tures. Inter­est­ingly most of the increase in cap­i­tal expen­di­tures occurred in 2009, which coin­cides with the launch of the fed­eral Eco­nomic Action Plan. Mean­while the grants and oper­at­ing expen­di­tures saw a more grad­ual increase of 29 and 26% respectively.
• Oper­at­ing expen­di­tures for libraries aver­aged $53 per capita, with Toronto tak­ing top spot with $69 per capita, fol­lowed by Van­cou­ver at $61. Mon­tréal, Ottawa and Cal­gary were all below aver­age, spend­ing between $36 and $43.

The study also pro­vides a fur­ther break­down of the results by city and cat­e­gory of spend­ing as well as look­ing at the aver­age incomes of cul­tural work­ers and artists in each city. Each city also pro­vided infor­ma­tion on the num­ber of dol­lars gen­er­ated from each $1 of fund­ing, based on infor­ma­tion col­lected from other stud­ies look­ing at dif­fer­ent fis­cal years and using dif­fer­ent method­ol­ogy, which makes com­par­isons riskier.

What explains Montréal’s abil­ity to stay on top?

Accord­ing to Hill Strategies: