Closing the First Nations Education Gap in Canada: Assessing Progress and Estimating the Economic Benefits — An Update Using 2021 Census Data

This report first assesses key labour market gaps facing First Nations people in Canada relative to non-Indigenous Canadians in 2021. It then estimates the economic benefits which would accrue to First Nations people and Canadians generally if these gaps were to be closed. Our primary focus is the educational attainment gap between the First Nations population and the non-Indigenous population, though we also investigate gaps in employment rates and average employment incomes, both conditional on educational attainment. This report updates a previous study undertaken by the Centre for the Living Standards and published by the Assembly of First Nations, repeating key exercises using newly-available data from the 2021 Canadian Census. We find that significant progress has been made in closing gaps in employment rates and employment incomes between the two populations since 2016. The educational attainment of both populations is found to have increased over the 2016-2021 period. However, nonIndigenous rates of improvement have outpaced First Nations rates of improvement, causing the gap to widen slightly. Using detailed tabular data from Statistics Canada, we are able to simulate the closure of these gaps both at the aggregate level and within age, gender, and province/territory categories. Ultimately, we estimate that the cumulative economic benefits associated with closing the education gap over the 2021-2041 period could be as large as $233 billion, and that the cumulative economic benefits associated with closing all three gaps of interest over the same timeframe could be as large as $369 billion.