The gig and digital economy has expanded in recent years, with the rapid growth of services such as food delivery, but just how many Canadians depend on it to put bread on their own table or to make ends meet at the end of the month?
It says that 79,000 Canadians provided taxi or ride-sharing services through an application or digital platform over the 12 previous months. Companies Uber and Lyft provide such services in Canada, matching drivers with clients.
The report also says that 207,000 workers provided delivery services for food or other goods over the same period. Uber Eats, DoorDash, and SkipTheDishes are some of the players in that field.
In total, roughly 250,000 Canadians were involved in the industry, indicating that some work in both ride-sharing and delivery services.
Statistics Canada says the main job for 58,000 of these individuals was working through a digital platform in the December Labour Force Survey reference week. This represents 0.3 percent of the approximately 19 million people who were employed in December.
Furthermore, 34,000 worked in the sector as secondary employment during the same period.
Most of the workers in these jobs have post-secondary education, the report states, with 38.8 percent having bachelor’s degrees or higher and another 41.4 percent with post-secondary education below a B.A. Most are also men (73.1 percent) and landed immigrants (55.7 percent).
The report also says that nearly half those workers are concentrated in the three metropolitan areas of Toronto (22.4 percent), Montréal (14 percent), and Vancouver (12.6 percent).
The report also touches on other types of services delivered through digital platforms, such as the creation of content like videos, blogs, or podcasts, as well as programming, coding, and web or graphic design.
Firm Closures and Gig Work
A previous analysis by Statistics Canada released in September delved into the factors that push workers towards the gig economy, which its says includes independent contractors, freelancers, day labourers and on-demand platform workers described earlier.“The study found that workers displaced by firm closures were about 50% more likely to be gig workers in the year following the displacement year than workers with similar characteristics who did not work in closing firms,” says the analysis.
It notes the pandemic led to widespread business closures and “fundamental changes in how individuals work and interact,” and that this should spur more urgent research on how job loss impacts gig work.
StatCan says that younger workers (25 to 34 years) were less likely to engage in gig work after a business closure than workers over 45.
“Possible explanations for this result include the relative scarcity of reemployment opportunities for older workers compared with younger ones and also lesser geographic and occupational mobility often required for reemployment.”
