Environmental and Clean Technology Products Economic Account: Human Resource Module, 2023

The aim of the Human Resource Module (HRM) is to provide timely and reliable statistics on the human resources associated with environmental and clean technology activities production in Canada.

The HRM complements and enhances the analytical capacity provided by the Environmental and Clean Technology Products Economic Account and allows for a broader insight into the sector's role in the economy by providing more detailed human resource information (e.g., gender, age, education, immigration status, Indigenous identity, wages and occupation types).

Estimates for 2022 and 2023 are preliminary and will be revised when updated data become available, including the supply and use tables for those reference years. National data from the Canadian Productivity Accounts are a key input to the HRM estimates. Data from the Labour Force Survey, the 2006, 2016 and 2021 censuses of population, and the 2011 National Household Survey are also incorporated.

In the HRM, the concept of "jobs" aligns with the Canadian Productivity Accounts definition and with the Canadian System of Macroeconomic Accounts. This concept corresponds closely to the production of goods and services and is based on the province or the territory of employment. Individuals may have more than one source of income from employment because they work for more than one employer. The number of jobs in the economy thus exceeds the number of people employed to the extent that employees may occupy more than one job. Estimates in this statistical product cover employee jobs only, which excludes self-employed jobs.

Since its introduction in the 2021 Census of Population, the "gender" variable refers to the gender of the person holding the paid worker job. Gender refers to an individual's personal and social identity as a man, woman or non-binary person (a person who is not exclusively a man or a woman). Given that the non-binary population is relatively small, data aggregation to a two-category gender variable is sometimes necessary to protect the confidentiality of responses. In these cases, individuals in the category "non-binary persons" are distributed into the other two gender categories. Prior to the 2021 Census of Population, this variable refers to sex.

Environmental and clean technologies are defined as any process, product or service that reduces environmental impacts through any of the following three strategies: environmental protection activities that prevent, reduce or eliminate pollution or any other degradation of the environment; resource management activities that result in the more efficient use of natural resources, thus safeguarding against their depletion; or the use of goods that have been adapted to be significantly less energy or resource intensive than the standard.