Yellowknife (Oct 25/04) - A report for the Canada Council on artists' average earnings says NWT artists are near the top and Nunavut artists are near the bottom.

The glitch is that the income numbers from the 2001 Census used in the study take all the reporting individual's earnings into account, not just the money earned from art. A high income day job would skew the statistics.

An artist in Nunavut earned on average $15,079, while an artist in the NWT earned $25,883. Only artists in PEI earned less than those in Nunavut and Ontario artists earned slightly more than those in the NWT.

The NWT and Nunavut were also polar opposites when it came to how many employed artists each territory had.

In Nunavut, 2.39 per cent of the overall labour force classified themselves as artists, the highest proportion in Canada. The NWT had the lowest proportion of its workforce in the arts at 0.5 per cent.

Artists in the Yukon earned amounts similar to those in Nunavut, and made up 1.38 per cent of the territorial workforce.

Kelly Hill of Hill Strategies Research Inc. crunched the numbers for the Canada Council for the Arts, the federal department of Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Arts Council.