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READ ME — Arts Operating Funding in Canada
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A combined dataset of public operating grants and appropriations to arts organisations, from federal, provincial, territorial and municipal funders.
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WHAT THIS IS
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One combined record of public OPERATING funding to arts organisations in Canada, built from the funders' own published recipient lists, annual reports, and audited statements. Each funder's sheet shows its organisations down the rows and years across the columns, so every cell answers the same question: what did this funder pay this organisation in this year? It covers federal bodies (Canada Council, Canadian Heritage, Telefilm, and direct appropriations), every provincial and territorial arts council or ministry that publishes recipients, provincial gaming and lottery instruments, and the arts-funding programmes of some thirty municipalities. As of 10 September 2026: 52 funder sheets, 12,440 organisation rows, 7,546 distinct organisations once cross-linked (counted as cross-linked groups, not rows), $11,683,967,338 recorded, series running from 1991 (Winnipeg, calendar year) to 2026-27.
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WHAT IT IS FOR
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Questions no single funder can answer: how public money to the arts is distributed across organisations, ages, regions and levels of government; how organisations move between funders over time; and what has changed. It records operating support only — recurring, unrestricted, cash, not double-counted. Project grants, capital funding, COVID emergency programs and in-kind support are out of scope except where a sheet's own scope note says otherwise.
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WHERE IT CAME FROM
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This file is the public edition of a research workbook maintained since 2026. Everything in it comes from public sources, and every funder sheet's first row says exactly which source, and whether its totals were reconciled to a figure the funder itself published (the 'Source register' sheet collects this for the whole file). The dataset was compiled, cross-checked and documented with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant); every scope decision, identity ruling and founding-year adjudication was reviewed and decided by the author, who is responsible for the contents. The research workbook also holds the full audit trail — the working logs behind every cross-link and founding-year decision — which is available on request.
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HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY
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The 'Directory' sheet lists every sheet with the funder's full name, level of government, years covered, and organisation count. Data sheets are named for the funder ('CCA', 'OAC', 'Calgary', 'MCC' ...) plus 'Directly Funded (operating)' for institutions paid by appropriation rather than grant; the remaining sheets are the file's own rules and registers, described below.
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HOW A FUNDER SHEET IS LAID OUT
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Row 1 is the title and carries the sheet's most important caveats — read it first. Row 2 is the header. Rows 3 onward are organisations, one per row, up to a row labelled TOTAL. Below TOTAL sit the sheet's SCOPE note (what is in, what was left out, and why) and any MEMO rows — nothing below TOTAL is an organisation. Standard columns: Organisation, Founding Year (with a source column beside it), the year columns, Total ($), Years Funded, Notes, and Also funded by.
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READING THE YEAR COLUMNS
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A header like '2023 ($)' is that funder's year as the funder reports it — calendar year for most cities, a fiscal year for councils and ministries; the title says which. A blank cell means NO AMOUNT RECORDED, which is not the same as NOT FUNDED: where the distinction matters, a '[funder name] coverage codes' sheet says, for each organisation-year, whether the amount is known (A), the organisation was confirmed unfunded (Z), funded but unpublished (C), unknown (U), impossible because the organisation did not yet exist (X), or inferred (I) — four funders have one (CALQ, New Brunswick (THC), Ville de Québec, Winnipeg), where the published record left real ambiguity. Do not lean on the Total ($) and Years Funded columns: on most sheets they are stored values that were correct when written, and on CCA, SK Arts, OAC, CALQ, MCC, Yukon Arts Council the Total is a live =SUM formula across that row's year cells. Either way, when you analyse, sum the year cells yourself.
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FOUNDING YEARS
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Every organisation carries a founding year where one could be established, in one of five forms explained on the 'Founding year forms' sheet: a bare number (known), 'by 1972', '1972 (uncertain)', 'c. 1972', or '1970s'. The rule is ACTIVITY BEATS LEGAL ENTITY: the year is when the organisation's continuous activity began, not when its current corporation was registered, and a merged organisation takes the older year. The evidence for each year is in the source column beside it.
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ONE ORGANISATION, MANY SHEETS
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About four in ten organisations appear on more than one funder sheet — and together they hold two-thirds of the dollars in this file — under names that often differ in spelling, language, article or corporate suffix. The 'Also funded by' column on each row declares the other sheets that hold the same organisation, and the 'Cross-link aliases' sheet records the name pairs that had to be matched by hand (alias rows are written in both directions — a consumer counting undirected pairs should halve the row count; one declaration may point at more than one row on a target sheet). 'Ruled distinct' is the negative register: pairs of similar names that have been adjudicated as different organisations and must never be merged. If you analyse this data, build organisation identity from these declarations, never from name-matching alone — for example, Canada has more than one Artspace.
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CONVENTIONS TO KNOW BEFORE ANALYSING
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Exclude everything at or below each sheet's TOTAL row before summing. Match rows by organisation name, never by row position. Money stays on the row of the body that received it, even if the activity later moved. Where a funder pays on a cycle rather than annually (Alberta's casino proceeds every two to three years; Canadian Heritage's multi-year agreements booked in the signing year), a single year under-represents that funder — average across its cycle. Where a sheet's basis differs from full-year awards (Québec's MCC records paid-to-date snapshots; see 'MCC basis'), scale only at the aggregate, never per cell. If you recount this file's headline figures: a row counts as an organisation if it sits above a sheet's TOTAL row, and a column counts as money if its header carries both a year and a '$' — under that rule, two independent implementations reproduce the totals above to the cent.
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KNOWN LIMITS
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Coverage is what the funders published: some cities are not here, some series start late or stop early, and no sheet is complete beyond its own scope note. Read a sheet's row 1 and the 'Source register' before trusting its totals. Where an organisation's 'Also funded by' declaration names a sheet of the research workbook that is not part of this public edition, that token has been removed from this file so that no reference dangles; the research workbook holds the complete declaration set. A few row notes still MENTION such a sheet by name — 17 of them, most often a 'Founding year conflicts' register that documents how the cross-sheet founding-year check was run. Where such a note appears, the record of that organisation's own revised year is on its row, in the note beside the year, not on the sheet the note names. Those notes are left exactly as written rather than edited for this edition: the sheets they name are part of the research workbook and are available on request. One Source register row likewise describes a sheet held back from this edition.
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VERSION, CITATION, LICENCE, CORRECTIONS
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This is version 0.9, review draft — a corrected v1.0 will be published with the accompanying essay; please send corrections to mark.c.hopkins@gmail.com before then. Generated 10 September 2026 from the research master (fcc69c30). Please cite it as: Hopkins, M. (2026). Arts Operating Funding in Canada, v0.9. LICENCE: this compilation is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — use, share and build on this dataset freely, with attribution. The underlying figures are facts drawn from the funders' own publications and are not claimed; contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada and equivalent provincial and municipal open licences, and all figures originate with the funders named on each sheet. Corrections and questions are welcome at mark.c.hopkins@gmail.com — if you spot an error, say which sheet and row, and it will be fixed in the master and flow into the next public version.
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