Return of the long-form census excites the experts

Public policy researchers harken for the return of the high quality data that was eliminated by the Harper government.

Thestar.com
Oct. 23, 2015
By Marco Chown Oved

One of the election promises made by Justin Trudeau that has delighted researchers, public policy makers and data geeks is the reinstatement of the long-form census.

As Mayor John Tory has said, you can’t make good decisions without good data. And after the mandatory long-form was eliminated and replaced with the voluntary National Household Survey (NHS), several public agencies, including Toronto Public Health, simply refused to use the numbers, saying they were unreliable.

Here are some examples of how the less accurate survey affected decisions in the GTA and what a return to the mandatory census might bode for the future.

Poverty Reduction

Harvey Low, manager of social research and analysis at the City of Toronto, says the elimination of the long-form census made identifying vulnerable populations more difficult.

When the city first identified 13 priority neighbourhoods in 2005, it relied heavily on census data. But in 2014, when the areas were replaced with 31 neighbourhood improvement areas, analysts at City Hall had to change their methodology and gather data from a variety of different sources.

Because public bodies and community agencies focus their programs in areas identified by the city, Low said, the lack of continuity makes it difficult to track progress.

Transportation

Metrolinx spokesperson Anne-Marie Aikins says the organization is excited for the return of the long-form census, which she called the “gold standard” that all other data sources are compared to.

“It provides key information on commuting to work, income, labour force participation and housing. It also plays a vital role by being standardized,” she wrote in an email. “It allows us to compare regions within the GTHA or to do meaningful comparisons against Metro Vancouver or Greater Montreal.”

Employment

Auditor General Michael Ferguson criticized the elimination of the long-form census in his 2014 annual report, focusing on how it has made Canada’s job market a guessing game.

“It is not possible to determine where in a province or territory job vacancies are located,” he wrote. What’s more, the survey isn’t specific about which fields have openings. “Professional, scientific and technical services could include jobs in advertising, legal services, architecture and biotechnology research.”

Without proper data, the government was forced to turn to less than reliable sources to calculate job openings: Kijiji.

Immigration

Luin Goldring, a sociology professor at York University who conducts research on immigration, said she doesn’t completely trust the voluntary data provided by the NHS.

“It is the only survey that comes close to providing good reliable data on a fairly wide range of information (in the long form) that allows researchers to look at the relationship between place of birth, parent’s place of birth, ethnic self-identification, education, age, gender, geographic location, economic outcome indicators, housing quality, language(s), etc.,” she wrote in an email.

While some of this information may be gleaned from other sources, it is piecemeal and cannot be cross-referenced. Researchers may be able to determine how much the poorest people in Toronto make, but they no longer know where these people were born or what level of education they have.