Ontario's Creative Class

In the last e-mailer, we introduced you to the ideas of Richard Florida. This month, we look at Competing on Creativity: Placing Ontario’s Cities in North American Context, a report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. Written by Meric S. Gertler and Richard Florida, Gary Gates and Tara Vinodrai, the study “examines the relationship between talent, technology, creativity and diversity in city regions in Ontario – and Canada more generally – and compares these to the relationships found to exist in American metropolitan regions.”

The report built on earlier analyses of American metropolitan areas by Florida and Gates that found the “social character of city-regions has a very large influence over their economic success and competitiveness.”

In the past, natural resources and access to transportation were two key determinants for economic growth. Today, with a shift to a knowledge-based economy, skilled workers are the most desirable commodity. Cities with more knowledge workers are most likely to thrive economically. The report found that “a vibrant local creative class and openness to diversity attracts knowledge workers”

The authors of Competing on Creativity used four indices to analyze and compare Canada’s 25 largest Census Metropolitan Areas:

• Talent Index: the proportion of the population over 18 years of age with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• Bohemian Index: the number of people employed in artistic and creative occupations, including writers, artists, musicians, designers, etc.
• Mosaic Index: proportion of the population that is foreign-born.
• Tech-Pole Index: compares a region’s share of national employment in high-technology industries to a region’s overall share of national employment. High-technology industries include: aircraft, electronic equipment, pharmaceutical, telecommunication, computers and others.

The overall results for Canadian cities are encouraging. Compared to similar-sized cities across in the United States, Canadian cities excelled on the Bohemian and Mosaic Indices, but were consistently lower on the talent index. Canada’s “most talented” cities, Ottawa and Toronto, only placed 10th and 24th respectively amongst the 43 cities with populations greater than 1,000,000.

The report suggests two possible reasons for this discovery. The first is that the lower rankings reflect divergent economic structures in the two countries. In Ontario especially, the manufacturing sector employs highly skilled workers who may not have bachelor’s degrees, and thus are not counted amongst the “talented” workers.. The second reason is that there generally appears to be a lower level of educational attainment in Canada.

So, how did London do?

• London is Canada’s tenth largest Census Metropolitan Area.
• London’s Talent Index ranked ninth amongst Canadian cities, above the national average but well beneath the leaders Ottawa-Hull, Halifax and Toronto.
• London’s Bohemian Index was just below the national average of 6.1 persons per 1000. Vancouver and Toronto held the top two spots with more than 9 persons per thousand.
• London’s Mosaic Index is slightly above the national average, though no city compares to Toronto (more than 40%) or Vancouver (nearly 35%)
• The Tech-Pole Index saw Montreal (more than 35%), Toronto (more than 30%), Ottawa-Hull (more than 15%), Vancouver (more than 10%) and Calgary (nearly 10%) dominate the category, with London amongst a group of cities with 3% or less of the nation’s high-technology jobs.

London has the positive distinction of being “the only city in Ontario that scores in the top half of the rankings for its size-group for all four indices. Amongst the 68 North American cities with populations between 250,000 and 500,000, London fared well in Talent (28th), Tech-Pole (26th), Bohemian (18th) and Mosaic (6th).

To read the entire study, download the PDF file from our website.

In our next e-mailer, we will look at some of the factors in London that may be helping or hindering the city’s chances of attracting the Creative Class.