Rural Canada Non-Profits Database
Metadata and user guide

1. Introduction

Non-profit businesses or organizations (NPOs), or non-profits, play an important role in the well-being and development of communities. NPOs have long served rural and small town communities when critical services and supports are not provided by for-profit businesses or by governments. The Rural Canada Non-Profits (RCNP) database is product of Statistics Canada that provides estimates for the counts, revenues, and employment numbers of non-profit businesses in both rural and small town and urban areas of Canada. This second release of the RCNP database provides data for the 2021 tax year. The database can be used for multiple purposes, e.g., for understanding the level of activity of non-profits in communities, what types of non-profit activities they are engaged in, for benchmarking of a community against comparable communities, etc. This product would be useful for a variety of rural and small town stakeholders such as businesses, levels of government, researchers, rural and small town residents, as well as residents of urban areas.

This document presents the data sources, methods and classification concepts used in the production of the RCNP database. It accompanies the release of the RCNP 2021 version of the database.

2. Database structure and contents

The RCNP database provides data on the counts, revenues, and number of employees for NPOs in Canada. This information is made available by NPO activity type in terms of the International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations (ICNPO),^Note  as well as by industry in terms of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). In addition to values at the Canada level, the data are provided geographically for provinces/territories and their rural and small town/urban parts. A table is also provided for counts, revenues, and number of employees at the census subdivision (CSD) level; however, this table does not provide breakdowns by NAICS or by ICNPO.

The structure of the RCNP database is summarized in Table 1.



The definitions of the variables available in the RCNP database are provided in the data dictionary in section 9.

3. Data sources

The RCNP database is created based on data obtained from Statistics Canada’s Business Register (BR) database. The BR is a comprehensive list of businesses in Canada.^Note  It contains such information for businesses as address, non-profit/for-profit status, industry, as well as their Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) filings and tax returns data, including revenues and employment. BR data are updated on a monthly basis.

While intended primarily as a frame for the conduct of business surveys by Statistics Canada, the BR is used advantageously for analytical and other statistical purposes. For example, the BR can be used to compile business demographic indicators like counts of enterprises in industries by province/territory.

4. Reference period of the database

The reference period of this second release of the RCNP database is 2021.

5. In-scope businesses

The primary determinant for inclusion of a business in the RCNP database is classification as a non-profit on the BR. A non-profit (i.e., a non-profit organization, institution, or business) operates for a purpose other than profit. The RCNP database includes non-profits that are charities. The RCNP database includes all non-profits or NPOs as identified by the BR, irrespective of the sector (households, businesses, or governments) that they are serve.

NPOs were included in the RCNP database if they reported either revenues, number of employees, or both for 2021. Public administration (NAICS code 91) businesses are excluded from the database. For-profit businesses are out of scope for the RCNP database.

6. Compilation methodology

This section provides an overview of the processing carried out to compile the database. The tables contained in the RCNP database are organized according to the structure presented in Table 1 above.

6.1 Listing of NPOs active in 2021

The initial step in the creation of the RCNP database was bringing together records from multiple monthly files of the BR to create a list of all NPOs that showed signs of certain types of activity at any time in 2021. This included examining the presence of employees or revenues for the 2021 reference year in monthly files of the BR ranging from January 2021 to December 2022. Only businesses designated as non-profit on the BR were retained, i.e., for-profit businesses were excluded. This resulted in a list of NPOs that either had employees, revenues, or both, for 2021.

Employment figures in the RCNP database are based primarily on CRA Statement of account for current source deductions (PD7)^Note  data. Revenues are based primarily on income tax filings with the CRA. Employment and revenue values were obtained from the appropriate BR file for the above list of NPOs. When the organizational structure of an NPO had several locations for the same enterprise, a separate record for each location was included, along with the employment and revenue values for each. These location-level values are based on profiling of businesses carried out by Statistics Canada or on employment or revenue allocation factors computed by Statistics Canada.

6.2 Rural and small town or urban classification of businesses

For this database, the statistical unit is the business location (also referred to as “location” in this document).^Note  The BR assigns each business location to a census subdivision (CSD) according to its operating address or legal address postal code. The rural and small town and urban breakdown classification on business was based on business locations.

The breakdown of Canada and provincial/territorial levels were created based on the 2016 Standard Geographical Classification (SGC).^Note  Census subdivisions (CSDs), or communities, outside of Census Metropolitan Areas/Census Agglomerations (CMA/CAs) are considered “rural and small town”, while those inside a CMA/CA are considered “urban”.

Based on whether a business location’s CSD was rural and small town or urban, it was allocated into one of the following categories:

• A business location in a CSD outside of CMA/CA was classified as rural and small town.
• A business location in a CSD inside a CMA/CA was classified as urban.

6.3 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) assignment

Businesses/organizations are classified by industry using the business’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)^Note  industry assignment on the BR. This assignment is based on the business’s primary industry. The structure of the NAICS classification is hierarchical, using a code that is between 2 and 6 digits long depending on the level of the hierarchy. This is shown in Table 2.



The RCNP database provides tabulations by NAICS classification at the two-digit, or sector, level (in addition to tabulations by the International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations (ICNPO) – see section 6.4 below). The RCNP database includes all industry sectors except Public administration (NAICS 91).

6.4 International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations (ICNPO)

The RCNP database also provides tabulations by the International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations (ICNPO). The ICNPO classifies NPOs according to their primary area of non-profit activity. This is the classification system recommended for the non-profit sector in the United Nations (UN) Handbook on Non-Profit Institutions for the System of National Accounts.^Note 

The ICNPO system classifies NPOs into 12 major groups, including a catch-all, residual group known as 'not elsewhere classified’:

• Group 1A: Culture and recreation
• Group 1B: Sports, recreation and social clubs
• Group 2: Education and research
• Group 3: Health
• Group 4: Social services
• Group 5: Environment
• Group 6: Development and housing
• Group 7: Law, advocacy and politics
• Group 8: Philanthropic intermediaries and voluntarism promotion
• Group 9: International activities^Note 
• Group 10: Religion
• Group 11: Business and professional associations, unions
• Group 12: Not elsewhere classified

The ICNPO category of a non-profit was obtained using a mapping of NAICS codes to ICNPO groups. This mapping is also used by Statistics Canada’s System of National Accounts Satellite Account of Non-Profit Institutions and Volunteering.^Note  The mapping used is provided in Table 3 in section 8.

6.5 Protecting confidentiality

Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any data which would divulge information obtained under the Statistics Act^Note  that relates to any identifiable person, business or organization without the prior knowledge or the consent in writing of that person, business or organization. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.

The level of granularity provided by the RCNP database (e.g., geographic, industry, etc.) requires that some values be suppressed in order to protect the confidentiality of businesses contributing to the aggregate in a particular cell of a table in the RCNP data. Data suppression has been implemented using a hierarchy-aware confidentiality program (G-Confid) developed by Statistics Canada in order to preserve confidentiality.

A value may be suppressed to protect confidentiality for two reasons:

1. Primary suppression: There are too few businesses contributing to the value of a cell; or, a cell value is dominated by one or too few businesses.
2. Secondary suppression: Another cell is suppressed to protect the value of a primary suppressed cell so a higher-level aggregate data can be published. For example, if the value of a variable (e.g., revenues) for only one CSD in a particular province and industry is suppressed to meet the confidentiality requirements, the value for this variable for another CSD in this industry is also suppressed. This is done in order to prevent the suppressed value from being derived as a residual from the corresponding total for that province and industry.

7. Possible future updates and revision strategy

Possible future updates of the database would add another reference year at a time. Possible future releases of the RCNP database may incorporate changes to the methodology of the product or the type and contents of the tables it provides. Data for reference years already released may undergo revision as a result.

8. Mapping between ICNPO and NAICS

The mapping used in the RCNP database between the International Classification on Non-Profit Organizations (ICNPO) and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is shown below.



9. Data dictionary

A list of the variables included in the RCNP database, including their description, is provided below.