For Canadians, census ticked all the right boxes

Nearly two million Canadians visited site over two days

Thestar.com
May 5, 2016
By Patty Winsa

Canadians, eh?

Who else would rush to fill out the census as if downing a glass of water after a decade-long statistical drought, and jam up StatsCan servers?

Or tweet a #censusselfie about how excited they were to fill out a form. A form?

“I’m a little bit excited. Welcome back, long-form census!,” wrote Kathleen Walsh, the executive director of Evidence for Democracy, an Ottawa-based not-for-profit that promotes government transparency.

Her group, one of many that campaigned for the return of the mandatory survey, started the “censusselfie” hashtag after forms arrived in mailboxes Monday.

That day, pride and excitement bubbled over as 700,000 people tried to access the Statistics Canada site. It crashed for 45 minutes Monday around 10 p.m.

“We’re following up to determine the cause,” Nadine Lacroix, the agency’s manager of media relations, said in an email. By Tuesday it was up and running again.

That morning, Richard Peddie, the former head of MLSE, received a call from a Star sports reporter. Peddie said he’d have to get back to him - he was filling out his census (long-form, of course).

“There were many reasons I voted for Trudeau,” Peddie said Wednesday in a phone interview, “and actually one of them was the census.” The Liberal government restored the mandatory survey a day after being sworn in.

“I couldn’t believe that a 21st-century, modern, fully developed country would abandon the census,” Peddie said. “I knew they were bringing it back, but in the last week, when I heard that people were receiving theirs, I thought, wow, that was quick.”

In two days, nearly two million Canadians had gone on the site.

The mandatory long-form census was killed in 2010 by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which called the 40-page document intrusive and the penalty for not filling it out - jail - too extreme. Industry Minister Tony Clement said one complaint about the census was a good enough reason to kill it.

Researchers across Canada, at every level of government as well as at universities and even newspapers relied on the longer survey to measure social ills like poverty and unemployment and to provide statistical benchmarks.

Groundbreaking work by U of T researcher David Hulchanski, who used the data to track Toronto’s disappearing middle class as well the alarming growth of urban poverty, came to a halt.

The last long-form census was in 2006. In 2011, the Harper government issued the short-form census as well as a longer voluntary household survey. The response rate dropped to 69 per cent from 94 per cent. StatsCan said the rate was so low in some areas that it couldn’t release the data because it was unreliable.

Next year that will no longer be the case. Statistics Canada will release the first round of data - population and dwelling counts - on Feb. 8.

More will follow, compiled from the short-form census, which includes questions about household composition, age, sex, marital status and language, sent out this year to more than 11 million households.

Another 3.8 million households will receive the long-form questionnaire which has additional questions, including ones on education, ethnicity, mobility, the labour market and employment.

Lacroix says the agency expects 65 per cent of respondents to choose the online option this time around, up from 18 per cent in 2006, when Stats Can first offered it.

“We are pleased to see the strong initial support,” said Lacroix. “However, the key goal remains reaching 100-per-cent response.”