Tuesday was Census Day, the yardstick moment at which the Canadian population is measured and quantified as it has been every five years since 1971.
This year is different, however. The detailed long form that used to be distributed to one in five households has been, for the first time, swapped for a national survey.
The switch stems from the Harper government’s decision last summer to abolish the mandatory long form in favour of a voluntary survey. The move sparked anger from a range of groups who said the changes will deprive government and citizens of detailed information about the country’s social makeup and eliminate the ability to track those changes over time.
That decision has prompted various responses. The short form remains compulsory but the number of refuseniks now encompasses new parts of the social-economic-political spectrum – including educated professionals. Meantime, others who stand to gain from the filling out of the forms, such as the Manitoba government, are running public campaigns to try to boost response rates.
The biggest question is how the latest count could possibly be as informative and accurate as those in the past. Statistics Canada says it is doing its best while critics contend the endeavour is a waste of time.
François Dumaine, a program evaluator, is one of those critics. He uses detailed census data “daily” to help assess the efficiency of programs that target crime prevention, new immigrants and aboriginal communities. He said he won’t fill out the mandatory short form, nor the voluntary survey, on principle – even if it means he winds up in the courts.
“I refuse to participate. … And I certainly have every intention of challenging it if I do receive the fine. I was asked to fill out the census, and this is not a census,” said the Ottawa-based partner at PRA Inc. and past president of the Canadian Evaluation Society.
“Canada is a very complex society – we have very sophisticated programs and initiatives. But in order to do the job of planning, delivering, evaluating programs, you need state-of-the art policy making tools. The census is absolutely critical to that. And you don’t play around for political reasons with that – it’s the mother of all data.”
Some are urging others not to participate. Hilary Campbell helps map out electoral boundaries and gives city councillors detailed portraits of various neighbourhoods as a planning technician in Halifax.
She filled out the short form. But she’s refusing to fill out the national household survey and is publicly urging others boycott it.
“The argument has been made that the household survey is an adequate replacement for the mandatory long form census – and I don’t agree with that. I don’t believe the results are going to be consistent,” said Ms. Campbell, who added she is speaking for herself rather than her employer, HRM Planning Services. “Between apathy and lack of understanding, this survey will be ignored by the very people we need to know more about– the impoverished, the illiterate, the uneducated, the immigrant population, the working poor, the mentally ill, the seniors, the homeless – the list is endless.”
Manitoba’s government is taking the opposite approach, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to educate the public on why they should fill out the short form. Manitoba’s basic message appeals to a sense of civic duty: It benefits everyone. Even the short form represents “an electronic library” of the community on age, gender and population density, said Wilf Falk, chief statistician at the Manitoba Bureau of Statistics.
Filling out the census bolsters community funding and planning, he said. Not filling out the forms hurts those flows. “For every person who is ultimately missed, Manitoba loses $40,000 in federal transfers – that would be equalization and health and social transfers – over a five-year period.”
