About this project

Politismo shows how many tourism businesses operate in each of British Columbia's 93 provincial ridings, roughly how many people they employ, and what share of local businesses they make up. It's built so MLAs, their staff and the people they represent can see tourism's role in their own communities.

Politismo is non-partisan. Every riding and every MLA is presented the same way, using the same public data.

Politismo is a partnership between the Tourism Industry Association of BC (TIABC) and Tourismo. TIABC advocates for the value of tourism to BC's communities and economy. Tourismo, a BC-built destination platform, contributes the data and technology as a social impact project.

Interested in more detailed data for your riding or region? Reach out - we'd love to see if we can help!

Here is an outline of our research process, data sources, rationales, and considerations.

These figures count active business locations with employees. They do not count companies, jobs, revenue, or spending by visitors. A hotel, a restaurant, and a travel agency are included because of the industry they are classified in, not because every customer is a tourist.

The source is Statistics Canada’s Canadian Business Counts, with employees, for census metropolitan areas and census subdivisions. The current figures use the December 2025 table (reference month July 2025, released 13 February 2026). Statistics Canada publishes this table twice a year. Earlier releases back to June 2020 are kept so a total can be compared with the previous period. The sparkline and the Change column use that earlier release. Change is the percent difference from the previous period. It is left blank when there is no earlier figure, or when the earlier figure is zero.

Adapted from Statistics Canada, Canadian Business Counts. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.

Only locations with employees are included. Statistics Canada does not publish a census-subdivision count for businesses without employees, and it omits a subdivision that has fewer than 10 employer locations. A blank cell in an otherwise published subdivision is treated as zero. A cell that Statistics Canada marks as suppressed is left unknown, and any total that depends on it is a reported minimum.

Each location is counted once, in its primary industry.

Tourism businesses are the five tourism industry groups used by the Canadian Tourism Satellite Account and Tourism HR Canada:

Those five groups do not overlap, so they add up to the tourism total. Some industries in the list also serve local residents. The count is businesses in tourism industries, not the share of their work that comes from visitors.

Business locations, on the place profile and in the local-economy tables, are all employer locations across the 20 top-level industry sectors. That is a wider count than tourism. Tourism’s share is the tourism total divided by that all-sector total. It is a share of locations, not a share of revenue, GDP, or jobs.

Statistics Canada publishes these counts for a whole census subdivision, such as a municipality or an Indigenous community. It does not publish a count for a custom boundary.

For most regions, a subdivision is included in full when its official centre point falls inside the region. The region total is the sum of those subdivisions.

For a BC provincial riding, the riding boundary cuts through subdivisions. Each overlapping subdivision contributes only the share of its area that lies inside the riding. A riding that covers about a seventh of a subdivision keeps about a seventh of that subdivision’s locations. The headline, the pie chart, and the employment-size table use those shares. Each share is rounded to a whole location, so the slices and the size bands can differ from the headline by one or two.

The communities table is different. Each row is the official count for the whole subdivision, including the part outside the riding. A riding total of 71 can sit above community rows of 408 and 101 because those rows are the full municipalities, and 71 is the riding’s share of them.

The employee figure is not a Statistics Canada employment count. Statistics Canada publishes how many locations fall in each size range, such as 1 to 4 employees or 20 to 49. The estimate multiplies the number of locations in each range by the middle of that range. The open-ended “500 or more” range is treated as 750 employees per location. The indicative range uses the low and high end of each band instead of the middle. This is a model, not a margin of error: the real number of employees inside each range is unknown.