The grumbling has begun.
Every five years, the Canadian government undertakes a huge task, to count every living person in the country and collect basic demographic information about them such as gender, age, marital status and living arrangements.
On Monday morning, where appropriate, a letter with a secure access code from Canada’s chief statistician started arriving in mailboxes asking people to fill out the census online or call for a paper form. In addition, thousands of enumerators fanned out across the country to make sure not only every individual who calls Canada home is accounted for, but every nook and cranny in which people reside is counted and described.
Aside from a few outliers, who are either outright hostile to the very idea of a census or thrilled to participate in any statistical exercise, most people would just as soon leave the census as take it and will comply begrudgingly. Many will just not bother despite the fact it is illegal not to comply.
That is correct. It has been enshrined in the Constitution since Confederation—that is 1867, 149 years ago—that the federal government must conduct a periodic census and citizens are required under the Statistics Act to respond.
There are very good reasons for this, not the least of which is that census data is the very foundation of our democracy, but we will get back to that. Unfortunately, that aspect of the importance of the census, particularly of the long-form data, is frequently overshadowed by the sometimes heated debate over the intrusiveness of the long-form questionnaire.
The long-form survey, which every fourth home is required to fill out, is, in fact, very detailed. And it does get into some very personal areas such as sexual orientation, health issues, sociocultural details, genealogical background, education levels and employment activities.
Unless a person is a conspiracy theorist, however, providing that information should not bother him because the survey is designed to help all of us. Furthermore, very few, if any, census employers will ever see the detailed information—particularly if the questionnaire is filled out online—and all census workers are sworn to secrecy anyway. They face hefty fines and/or jail time if they divulge any of the information they are privy to.
Also, the information cannot be divulged by law until 92 years after it is collected, and then only if the person consents now to having it made public in the distant future. As an aside, that is something that should change because sometimes census information is the only information descendants of a person have about them or that communities have about where they came from.
Finally, policy makers, i.e., all levels of governments, that use census data to plan and deliver public services, do not get to see individual data, only the rolled up statistics.
The long-form data is extremely important and Canada is now in a very unique position to understand just how important because of the failed experiment of making it voluntary during the last census in 2011. One need look no further than Melville, which became a statistical ghost town after 2011 because so many people there refused to participate.
Getting back to democracy, representation in our houses of government is based on census data. It is what numbers and boundaries of constituencies are roughly based on, notwithstanding politicians’ attempts to gerrymander them.
Finally, there is posterity. As briefly hinted at above, the data will be extremely important to families, communities and the country in the future to know who we were individually and as a people in 2016.
The front of the envelope the census questionnaire arrives in states: “Complete the census—It’s the law.”
That is true, but it is not the reason people should feel compelled to do so. Complete the census because it is the right thing to do. It may be too much to ask people to actually enjoy filling out the form, but we should, at least, get a sense of pride out of doing it for the sake of ourselves, our communities, our provinces, our country and generations to come.
