Walk past any community centre on a weeknight and you'll hear it: tap shoes on a gym floor, a hip-hop class counting off eights, a seniors' line-dancing group laughing through a missed step. Dance is everywhere in Canada. But if you ask how many Canadians dance, what it costs their families, or why so many kids stop, there's no current answer. The last time anyone tried to map it nationally was more than a decade ago.
The last national snapshot
In 2011, the Canada Council for the Arts, in partnership with the Ontario Arts Council, launched the Canada Dance Mapping Study to identify, quantify and describe the ecology, economy and environment of dance in Canada. Its centrepiece was a bilingual online survey called Yes I Dance (Oui je danse), open to anyone in Canada aged 16 or older who danced, taught or choreographed in an organized or ongoing way.
The findings, published by the Canada Council in 2014, drew 8,124 responses. Respondents named roughly 190 different dance forms, and most were involved in two to four of them. Even with that reach, the authors were careful: because nobody knows the true number of dance participants in Canada, the report treats its sample as non-representative.
The headline number still matters. Of those 8,124 people, 2,176 (27%) were dance professionals and 5,948 (73%) were leisure participants. Dance in Canada is mostly recreational, and it was the recreational dancers who were least visible in the data.
Built for the professional side
The national organizations that exist today were set up to serve specific parts of the dance world, and they do that well. The Canadian Dance Assembly is the national service organization for dance and describes itself as the voice of the professional dance sector. Since 2019 it has managed the Dance Across Canada map that grew out of the 2011 study. Canada DanceSport is the governing body for competitive DanceSport.
On the sport side, Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities helps families get kids into sport and studies what's keeping them out. Dance falls in the gap. It's too recreational to be the main focus of professional arts bodies, and it isn't treated as a sport by the groups that fund and research youth sport.
What we know about sport, and don't know about dance
Jumpstart shows what consistent tracking can do. Its 2025 State of Youth Sport report, covered by CTV News, broke down the median annual cost of individual sports: about $450 for soccer and nearly $1,938 for hockey. It found that families spend an average of $3,064 a year on organized sport, and that 93% of families with kids in sport see benefits to mental and emotional well-being.
Those numbers shape policy, funding and where programs get built. Dance doesn't have them. Nobody is tracking:
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What dance costs families. Tuition is just the start. Costumes, competition fees, travel and exam fees add up, and we have no national figure.
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Who quits, and why. We don't know when kids drop out of dance, or whether cost, time, body image or access is the main reason.
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What dance does for mental health. Dancers and parents talk about confidence, belonging and stress relief, but there's no Canadian data to back it up.
Without that information, studios, schools and community programs are left making decisions on guesswork. Families can't compare costs, and funders have no evidence to justify investment.
Where Canada Dances fits
This is the gap Canada Dances was created to fill. We want to be for dance what Jumpstart is for sport: a national voice for the hundreds of thousands of kids and adults who dance in studios, schools and community programs, whether or not they ever plan to go professional.
That starts with asking the questions nobody else is asking. We're building a national survey of recreational dancers and dance families to measure costs, track why people stop dancing, and document the mental and physical health benefits that dancers already know are real. The goal is data that studios, schools, parents and funders can use.
How you can help
The 2011 study proved that Canadians will show up when asked about dance. More than 8,000 people did. Now it's time to ask again, and to keep asking.
If you dance, teach, run a studio or drive a kid to class twice a week, we want to hear from you. Join the Canada Dances community to be among the first to take part in our survey and help build the picture of dance in Canada that's been missing for too long.
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