On a sunny afternoon in early March 2020, just days before the country—and world—experienced its first COVID-19 lockdown, Julie Dabrusin, then the parliamentary secretary to the minister of Canadian heritage, was in a crowded conference room to introduce a panel entitled “Writing the Next Chapter: Investing in Canada’s Creative Economy.”
We are here, she told the audience of publishing and business people, to celebrate “the importance of telling Canadian stories” and the importance of the economy’s cultural sector, which contributes $53 billion to the country’s GDP, more than agriculture, forestry, and fishing combined. The cultural industries are major drivers of employment, responsible for more than 666,500 jobs in Canada, including jobs for writers and filmmakers and studios and the coffee shops and spinoff industries that serve them.
