Lean Season

March is lean season in PEI. The pantries are baring of last season’s vegetables, and hothouses are still waiting for longer days. The solid green heads of stored cabbages are getting smaller as more of the protective outer leaves wilt, tired and grey, and are stripped away. We are getting down to our core.

Many creative careers in PEI are similarly seasonal, and it is a lean season for many formal jobs and incomes in arts and culture. However, for many creative workers and organizations, the work continues when the money does not; seasons of income and seasons of productivity don’t always align. This leaves artists and organizations in a state of precarity – and in these uncertain economic times and under the influence of climate change, the seasons are shifting.   

There is no natural reason for a lean season in artists and creatives’ incomes, and there is no excuse for the precarity imposed on creative workers. The arts and culture sector in Canada has grown substantially as an economic contributor, both in GDP and employment, while individual incomes for artists and creative workers have remained low relative to the broader labour force.

A recent Artworks report (2025) for the Canadian Chambers of Commerce shows the arts and culture sector directly contributed $65 billion to Canada’s GDP in 2024 and supported jobs at a rate higher per dollar of output than key industries like oil and gas or manufacturing. (Cultural exports have also doubled since 2011, although export markets, norms, and expectations have been put through the shredder by the Trump White House.)

Nevertheless, multiple statistical profiles find that artists and cultural workers earn significantly less than the average Canadian worker, with total incomes well below the overall labour force. For example, artists’ average total individual income was documented as about 32 percent lower than the overall labour force and earnings from work lower still.

Thousands of residents of our island make professional income from work in arts and culture every year, but few make a livable income from that work. Creative and artistic workers continue to experience volatile, unstable incomes, frequent self-employment, and dependence on mixed income sources rather than stable employment that is directly arts-related.

March is lean season in PEI: finding enough light in the dark times to write by, gathering to sing ourselves into warmth, seeking the image of better days, sewing into the quilt of social change. We are choosing which seeds to plant in the resting soil when the sun thaws the ground and the waters clear of ice.

Because March is lean season, but it is also planning season, and CreativePEI is continuing work to bring together leaders across arts and culture to plan: how can we build a creative sector where we can lean on each other? 

We hope to use this monthly space in The Buzz to continue a conversation about creative careers, living well in arts and culture, and lifting up a sector that is as essential to our collective survival through all the season as the vegetables are in our pantries.

Formed twenty years ago as a cultural human resources sector council with representatives across a dozen arts disciplines and cultural fields, CreativePEI is a sector catalyst and connector that empowers PEI’s arts, culture, and creative professionals to achieve good incomes and good outcomes. Jane Ledwell has been the Executive Director since November 2025.