Released in July 2022, Projections of Tourism Employment Demand in Canada provides initial results from a three-year project to update and enhance the labour supply and demand projections for the tourism sector. Tourism HR Canada commissioned the Conference Board of Canada to model projections into 2025 for the tourism sector and its five constituent industries: accommodations, food and beverage services, recreation and entertainment, transportation, and travel services.
The report’s findings are based primarily on job demand stemming from the business perspective (demand side), but also include discussion of some outcomes that arise from labour challenges on the supply side, namely in the form of job vacancies.
Among the key findings:
- By 2025, employment in the tourism sector is projected to surpass pre-pandemic levels—growing by 2.5% over 2019’s employment level.
- Tourism’s share of overall employment in Canada in 2025 (10.5%) will fall just shy of its share in 2019 (10.8%).
- While workforce recovery is projected to be uneven across the five tourism industry groups, employment gains in the food and beverage services industry will be a key driver of overall tourism employment growth.
To complement the full report, Tourism HR Canada has prepared a short factsheet for each of the five industry groups. These factsheets summarize some of the key findings, including projections by occupation and by region. They provide a high-level overview of some of the anticipated pressure-points that businesses are likely to face in the next two years; they are not cast-iron guarantees, of course, but they are useful starting points for operators and sector associations in planning for the future.
