Closing the First Nations Education Gap in Canada: Assessing Progress and Estimating Economic Benefits - An Update

This report estimates the economic benefits associated with the closure of key labour market gaps facing First Nations people in Canada relative to non-Indigenous Canadians. We are primarily interested in the educational attainment gap. However, we also estimate the benefits of closing gaps in average employment income and employment rates between the two populations, conditional on educational attainment. In doing so, we provide an update to earlier reports by the CSLS on the subject. By comparing labour market outcomes recorded in the 2016 Census to those observed in previous Censuses, this report gauges the progress made over the last decade or so in eliminating these gaps. It then offers updated estimates of the economic benefits which would result from closing these gaps in terms of gains in GDP, employment income, employment rates, and productivity. By mobilizing individual-level Census microdata, we are able to breakdown these gains across age group, sex, province, and educational attainment category. Ultimately, we estimate that the cumulative economic benefits associated with the closure of the education gap could be as large as $265 billion, and that the cumulative economic benefits associated with the closure of all three gaps of interest could be as large as $457 billion.