On June 7, Statistics Canada will be releasing the Tourism Human Resource Module (T-HRM), a comprehensive employment database commissioned by Tourism HR Canada. This latest iteration will have data from 2009 to 2022, and includes employment data through the lenses of gender, immigration status, education level, work type (full-time or part-time), and wages. This first release of data is at the aggregate industry group level; occupation-level data is expected in July.
The Tourism HR Canada website will be updated with some preliminary charts on June 7, while the full data set is processed and uploaded to the Rapid reSearch tool, accessible for free through our Emerit site. The richness of the data set means that it may take a little while to have the Rapid reSearch tool fully updated, but we believe it will be worth the wait.
The T-HRM will be an incredibly valuable tool for charting our sector’s course out of the pandemic and into a new period of growth.
Regular data sources such as the monthly Labour Force Survey are necessarily based on a small sample size, so they are useful for showing general trends and big changes, but they are not meant to be a true-to-life, accurate snapshot of the sector.
There is much valuable information to be gleaned from the census as well, but this exercise is only carried out every five years and doesn’t always do the best job of capturing some of tourism’s more seasonal occupations or industries.
The T-HRM will provide very granular data across the country, with annual slices of the data to show detailed trajectories in the post-pandemic world in which we are now operating.
With the latest data coming from 2022, the picture will still be from within the window of disruption, but it will offer insightful data on the first three years of the pandemic, and will help us better understand the path that led us to where we are today.