Public Sector Expenditures on Recreation and Culture - Canada, 1988 to 2005

Harry Kitchen (Trent University) and Enid Slack (UofT) produced a paper in 2006 entitled 'Trends in Public Finance in Canada'.  The tables below are taken from this paper - modified to focus on recreation, culture, environment and resource conservation.

   Distribution of Municipal Government Expenditures
         by category - Canada, 1988 and 2004

Distribution of Provincial/Territorial Expenditures
   by category - Canada, 1989 and 2005

  Distribution of Federal Expenditures

    by category - Canada, 1989 and 2005

Essentially, the data demonstrates that public expenditure on recreation and culture more than held its own against other government expenditures at both the municipal and federal levels - but lost budget share at the provincial/territorial level.  This in spite of relatively large increases in other areas:

• at the municipal level the greatest increases from 1988 to 2004 were in housing (1.8% of total budget in 1988, up to 3.7% in 2004), social services (7.4% to 10.2%), environment (14.6% to18.1%), health (2% to 2.5%) and protection (14.8% to 16.7%)
• at the provincial/territorial level the greatest increases related to health (26% in 1989, up to 33.6% in 2005)
• at the federal level the greatest budget pressures related to health (from 5.7% of the total budget in 1989 to 10.9% by 2005), environment (0.4% to 0.9%) and general purpose transfers (6.4% to 10.8%).

Source: http://www.utoronto.ca/mcis/imfg/pdf/trends%20in%20public%20finance%20in%20Canada%20-%20June%201.pdf