The outdoor advocacy group Protect Our
Winters (POW) just released a commissioned study on the economic impact of
Canada’s outdoor recreation sector. The United States pioneered this in 2017 by
creating a measurable economic category for recreation, thereby giving it a new
place in that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) calculations.
The Canadian report estimates outdoor
recreation to be a 101 billion dollar economic contribution to Canada’s annual GDP,
providing 1 million jobs. It estimates 78% of Canadians participate in outdoor
recreation. This places outdoor recreation with a larger economic impact than
forestry or agriculture, but smaller than oil and gas.
This all leads to a call on governments to protect our natural
environments and deal with climate change, and to invest in more accurate
measures of outdoor recreation’s economic impact. It points out that
governments underinvest, spending a fraction on outdoor recreation per job or
by contribution to GDP that it does on forestry or energy.
The data is
triangulated from many sources, making the extensive footnotes the most
interesting part of the (brief) report, but highlighting this is a preliminary
estimate. It is based upon 23 outdoor recreation activities (in an attempt to
align with the existing U.S. economic measure) which is not a great fit for
Canada’s different climate and recreation habits. The Canadian estimate is
likely low, as it comes in at 2% of the U.S. recreation impact value, even when
our population is 10% of the U.S.’s (therefore intuitively our number should be
about 10% of the U.S. number).
What is interesting is that tourism gets little to no mention in the report, yet the fine print lists “services, travel, lodging and guides…”. Canada’s tourism sector generates 102 billion dollars annually according to Destination Canada, making it the same size as the outdoor recreation values calculated the POW report. There is obviously overlap – the same spending landing in both the recreation and tourism numbers, but it seems to be a purposeful omission. The difference between tourism and recreation is that tourism is by default an economic activity, actively managed by thousands of businesses with a financial stake in the sector. Recreation has large aspects that are non-economic (and thereby absent from economic measures all this time) – what is the value of a local walking trail? What is the value of a bike ride? Recreation is left to pick up the pieces of retail sales and other assorted traces of spending, with no comprehensive advocate until now.
The more
ambitious leap is to propose a value multiplier for non-economic activities; to
put a value on a walk or bike ride as an activity in itself. Recreation
activities are key motivators for a wide swath of the population (78% according
to this report) so therefore drives decisions such as where one lives, the job
one does, and where one goes on vacation. This just takes a brave economic
philosopher to peg the value of these things, so it can be measured in a world
where it seems only money gets any voice.
The report can be found here: