Environment Industry,1995, Preliminary Data - ARCHIVED

The federal government's Canadian Environmental Industry Strategy consists of a number of initiatives to achieve a cleaner environment and a stronger environmental industry. Statistics Canada received funding from Industry Canada, under Initiative 8 of the strategy, to develop a national statistical database on the environment industry. Statistics Canada began a program consisting of new surveys, modifications to existing surveys and integration of statistics from various components of its economic statistics framework.

The environment "industry" does not exist as an explicit element in any existing classification. This is not surprising, because the environment industry consists of business involved in activities that span a number of different industries in the Standard Industrial Classification. Attempts had been made to identify environmental goods and services in existing classifications, but without appreciable success. It was necessary to develop new ways and new tools to obtain the information. These methods are outlined.

A major objective of the approach adopted by Statistics Canada is to provide sufficient detail to permit comparability of the results with other countries and to satisfy a variety of data needs.