Opera Canada Top 50

When Ruby Mercer founded Opera Canada in 1960, the existing opera business largely amounted to the Canadian Opera Company in the private sector, along with the established teaching institutions and our public broadcaster. The Canadian opera network today is considerably more complex geographically and economically. There’s a roster of performing companies big and small almost from coast to coast, and while the CBC long ago abandoned its role as a producer and sponsor of live opera, the conservatories, universities and commercial teaching programs remain a vital component of the sector.

But just how big is Canada’s opera industry? How do the performing companies stack up against each other as businesses? What might be the sector’s overall economic clout?

This first edition of the Opera Canada Top50 launches an initiative to address these questions. Using financial and operating data supplied by the performing companies to Revenue Canada, the accompanying table provides a ‘by the numbers’ snapshot of the domestic opera business, ranking the companies by overall revenues while also presenting data on fundamental income and expense categories, assets and liabilities.

For reasons explained below, the resulting snapshot is hardly high definition, but it does provide an image that reflects reality more clearly than previously available. Opera America, the New York-based opera-industry association, has for many years issued an “Annual Field Report” with a section on Canada. While including some useful indicative information, their latest 2019 report