Baffin: Canada’s artsiest rural region

The Baffin region is the “most creative rural area in Canada,” says a recent survey done for a group of government arts funding agencies.

The survey, done by Hill Strategies Research, used information from Statistics Canada’s 2001 census to count the number of artists living in each of Canada’s postal code regions.

The found that the X0A region, which takes in the Baffin region, has 230 artists in a population of 6,700 workers, for an “artistic concentration” of 3.4 per cent, four times the national average of 0.8 per cent.

Nunavut’s X0C region, which takes in the Kivalliq, was tied for sixth place in Canada with an artistic concentration of 1.6 per cent.

Canada’s artsiest urban neighbourhood, the survey found, is Montreal’s Plateau area, centred around Mount Royal Avenue between St-Denis and Park Avenue, with an artistic concentration of 8 per cent.