As artificial intelligence tools divide Ontario creators, a landmark cultural report exposes the stark realities of missing benefits and stagnant wages.

TORONTO — Despite a modest growth in total employment, Ontario’s arts and culture workers are operating under severe financial strain, with more than half facing low and inconsistent pay, and nearly a third considering walking away from the sector entirely, a comprehensive new study reveals.

We have been reading this landmark report with interest. Prepared by international consulting firm Nordicity for the non-profit arts service organization Work in Culture, “Making It Work 2026: Pathways to Sustainable Cultural Careers“ delivers a statistics-packed diagnosis of a sector that has survived a global pandemic only to face a landscape of systemic underfunding, extreme administrative burnout, and shifting technological pressures.

Led by researchers Julie Whelan, Nikitha Gopal, and Louis Underwood, the multi-source study compiles data from a province-wide survey of cultural workers and organizations alongside custom tabulations from Statistics Canada’s Census of Population. The findings depict a highly educated, deeply committed workforce trapped in non-linear, precarious career paths where creative passion routinely subsidizes economic instability.

High Education, Low Returns: The Culture Workforce Profile

Ontario’s cultural sector has expanded slightly, with headcount rising three percent to an estimated 282,402 individual workers, up from 274,220. This growth, however, masks sharp internal imbalances across the sector’s primary divisions: the cultural and creative industries (comprising 53% of the workforce), the arts (22%), design (18%), and galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, known as GLAMs (5%).

The sector stands out as one of the most formally educated workforces in the province. While 36% of workers across all Ontario industries hold a university bachelor’s degree, that figure jumps to 55% across the culture sector as a whole, peaking at 63% within creative industries and 62% in GLAMs.

Yet, this high level of academic credentialing does not translate to financial security. Isolating for culture-related earnings, the adjusted average annual income for a cultural worker sits at a modest $41,400. Even when evaluating income across all revenue sources, the average hovers at $47,900.

When audience-facing arts specializations—which suffered devastating income disruptions due to pandemic-era closures—are completely excluded, the sector average rises to $59,700. This baseline parity with pre-pandemic census figures shows that real wages in culture have effectively stagnated over a multi-year period characterized by soaring inflation and rising costs of living.

The Subsidized Creative: Splitting Time to Survive

The economic reality forces many cultural professionals to operate as multi-hyphenate gig workers, balancing internal creative practices with external employment. Half of all survey respondents (51%) report maintaining a secondary area of practice within the culture sector itself, with a vast majority (79%) bridging the gap between non-profit arts and commercial creative industries.

The report reveals a profound mismatch between the time invested in cultural work and the income it generates. Workers devote an average of 33 hours per week to their cultural practices. Strikingly, even those who generate less than a quarter of their annual income from culture-related activities still dedicate an average of 20 hours a week to their craft—essentially working a part-time job for minimal financial return.

To bridge the financial gap, 26% of cultural workers hold secondary jobs completely outside the sector. The breakdown of where these workers secure secondary employment includes:

• Education: 34%
• Not-for-profit / Charity: 24%
• Hospitality and Tourism: 14%
• Retail: 13%
• Technology: 12%

Furthermore, the study notes an intersection with specialized manual labour, estimating that seven percent of the cultural workforce—roughly 21,150 individuals—possess a skilled trade credential.

Barriers to Sustainability and the Leadership Squeeze

Economic volatility remains the single greatest threat to long-term career viability in Ontario culture. Low and inconsistent income was flagged as the top barrier to career sustainability by 55% of workers, while 42% cited a lack of stable employment, such as short-term contracts and unpredictable gig structures.

These persistent pressures are driving a quiet exodus. One in three cultural workers (32%) admitted to seriously considering leaving the sector entirely over the past three years. When asked what structural shifts would convince them to stay, 71% pointed directly to higher or more consistent income, 46% required long-term employment opportunities, and 28% cited a need for affordable mental health and medical care.

“The mid-career period in the culture sector can feel like a plateau, with cultural workers moving quickly through early-stage responsibilities only to encounter a lack of clearly defined next steps.”

This retention crisis intersects heavily with a severe administrative bottleneck. Modern cultural workers are increasingly forced to be cross-functional generalists. Respondents ranked entrepreneurial, business, leadership, and management skills (59%) right alongside raw artistic creation and curatorial skills (57%) as critical to their professional survival. Grant-writing and navigating complex funder landscapes followed closely at 34%.

This administrative burden is mirrored at the organizational level. Out of the cultural workplaces surveyed, nearly two-thirds (63%) state that human resource responsibilities are entirely absorbed by overextended senior management or executives. Only 16% of organizations possess a dedicated HR department, forcing artistic directors and executives to spend vital creative hours managing compliance, internal governance, and funding paperwork.

AI Disruption: A House Divided

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence technologies has introduced a stark ideological and operational divide across Ontario’s cultural landscape. The study reveals that while tech adoption is moving quickly in commercial environments, a massive contingent of independent creators is actively resisting the shift.

While 51% of organizations and 31% of individual workers have integrated AI tools into their workflows to capture productivity gains in administrative writing, translation, or basic design, the resistance is rooted in deep structural anxieties. Fully 47% of individual cultural workers choose to avoid AI tools altogether, citing explicit ethical, artistic, and labour-related concerns.

During roundtable discussions, music and performing arts participants described generative AI as an “existential crisis” that threatens to bypass human creative development entirely. Roundtable voices called heavily for updated licensing frameworks to ensure creators are fairly compensated when their intellectual property is used to train large language models.

Entrenched Inequalities and the Path Forward

The report underscores that systemic barriers remain deeply entrenched for equity-deserving groups and rural communities. Indigenous workers continue to be significantly underrepresented, accounting for just 1.45% of the cultural workforce compared to the 2.31% provincial labour average. Additionally, visible minority workers, who make up 35% of the overall sector, are heavily clustered in high-paying commercial subsectors like digital media and advertising (41%) but remain starkly underrepresented in the arts (25%) and GLAMs (18%).

Roundtable participants criticized colonial funding models that force community organizations and equity-deserving leaders to constantly justify their existence through onerous reporting metrics. Leaders are frequently expected to represent or advocate for entire marginalized populations without receiving adequate compensation or structural organizational support.

To counter this compounding instability, Nordicity’s research team outlines a multi-pronged framework for sector-wide reform. The report urges cultural associations, public funders, and post-secondary institutions to collaborate on four immediate areas of action: implementing broad sector advocacy backed by simplified data collection, executing a “radical sharing” of operational and HR resources across small organizations, strengthening mid-career mentorship pathways, and creating a shared infrastructure network to combat skyrocketing physical rental costs.

Without coordinated structural intervention, the study warns, Ontario risks hollowed-out cultural career pathways, leaving a vital economic engine vulnerable to accelerating burnout and talent loss.

Read the full report here: Making It Work 2026: Pathways to Sustainable Cultural Careers