2009 GDP Per Capita

Many of the maps in this series so far have described the sharp socio-economic dividing line that Canada's North-South boundary usually represents. Almost always, social and economic conditions are worse in the North. But fortunes can change--as they have with the relatively recent discovery of diamonds in the Northwest Territories and nickel in Northern Newfoundland and Labrador.

Natural resource extraction can have a huge effect on GDP per capita because it takes relatively few people to produce tremendous wealth. Oil and gas, diamonds, gold, base metals, timber, hydroelectricity, uranium, fish, and other natural resources are abundant in the Canadian North. As the map and table show, resources have given Canada's northwestern provinces and territories some of the highest GDP-per-capita numbers in the country.

Notes: North-South boundary line based on economic regions, rather than on census divisions as in previous maps. For more information on GDP and growth in the North, see The Conference Board of Canada's February 2011 briefing Estimating Economic Activity in Canada's Northern Regions.
Source: The Conference Board of Canada.

Methodology

Statistics Canada produces employment data for several industries in the economic regions in its Labour Force Survey. These data were converted to output by the Conference Board using provincial productivity data (output per employee in each industry). The provincial productivity data were estimated using Statistics Canada's Provincial Economic Accounts. All output is expressed in real (2002) dollars.

The Labour Force Survey for the economic regions is estimated annually. Employment is available for major three-digit North American Industry Classification System industry groupings: agriculture, other primary industries (which include forestry, mining, fishing, and hunting), construction, manufacturing, utilities, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and warehousing, information and arts, finance and insurance, commercial services, non- commercial services (which include education, health, and social services), and public administration. These groupings line up perfectly with the provincial productivity data that we used. Therefore, we also used these groupings for our analysis.

The Conference Board's historical database covers the period 1999 (when Nunavut became a territory) to 2009. Some of the employment data are confidential due to the small sample size of certain industries. To ensure respondents' confidentiality, Statistics Canada suppresses employment industrial data in an economic region if the estimate is below a certain threshold--1,500 employees in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, and 500 in Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The employment gaps were estimated in our analysis based on historical employment levels in each industry and province.

Canada's economic regions were classified as "Northern" or "Southern" to align as closely as possible with the Centre for the North's definition of the North, which is based on census divisions. A new boundary line was drawn to reflect this classification.

GDP-per-capita data were calculated for each Northern and Southern region, using the method described above. Values were rounded to the nearest $1,000 and manually entered into a geographic information system (ArcGIS) for the 10 Northern and 10 Southern regions. Values were classified as <$35,000, $35,000-$45,000, and >$45,000, mapped, and labelled for all regions. Excel's SORT function was used to sort the GDP-per-capita numbers for all 20 regions that appear in the table.

About the Series

Here, the North is a bi-weekly series researched, written, and produced by The Conference Board of Canada's Centre for the North. The series is designed to illustrate similarities and differences--between Canada's North and South, and between Northern regions--in keeping with the Centre's mandate to provide policy-directed research to decision makers.

This issue of Here, the North was researched and written by Peter Wilson.