A senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has written a letter condemning the way that the next Canadian census will be taken.
Armine Yalnizyan authored the missive and posted it on the CCPA website today.
Addressed to federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement (who is also responsible for Statscan) and Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada, the letter criticizes changes to the way that census will be taken in 2011.
Yalnizyan’s concerns centre on the transition from a mandatory long-form questionnaire to a short, voluntary survey that will possibly yield less information than the traditional census format.
Among other things, she claims that these changes will affect the quality of information that respondents will relay, and therefore impact the accuracy of information used in important policy decisions regarding a number of critical issues including housing, immigration and employment.
Yalnizyan wrote the letter after reading a Canwest report printed in The Ottawa Citizen that describes the deficit of information this will create for genealogists in the future.
CTV reports that Canadian and Toronto business economist associations also oppose the changes.
Read Yalnizyan's letter here.
Justin Langille reports for The Tyee.
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Curious Guy
1 year ago
Canadian Census
Every effort should be made to expand the scope of the census rather than reduce it. This is the bedrock information that govenrment, non-profits and business all use for innumerable public policy and investment decisions. The more raw data to analyse the better. In spite of any consiratcy theories personal privacy is maintained by the Statistics Canada.
In both Australia and New Zealand have made significant efforts to include al segments of the population including the homeless into their national population counts. At the opposite end of the spectrum the recent census conducted in May, 2010 in the USA had only 10 questions on the form. There was one housing question: do you own or rent. How can you do any sort of public policy planning with a almost complete lack of information?
Dahlia
1 year ago
Census
Clearly Mr. Harper has an agenda, and real facts play no part in his plans.
The only good thing might be that if Lockheed Martin (the US Comnpany that was doing our census but - we were told - wouldn't read it, the last time), is going to be doing it again, they won't learn as much about us this time.
Dahlia
1 year ago
Census
Clearly Mr. Harper has an agenda, and real facts play no part in his plans.
The only good thing might be that if Lockheed Martin (the US Comnpany that was doing our census but - we were told - wouldn't read it, the last time), is going to be doing it again, they won't learn as much about us this time.
Van Isle
1 year ago
Since the late 80's I have
Since the late 80's I have refused to do anything with the census. I was threatened once by a census taker that I could be charged. I told her to charge me and then said "lets just quit pissing around, just send me to jail". Never heard a peep from Census Canada after that. She asked me why I refuse to co-operate and I told here that I no longer believe in the tooth-fairy and I also don't believe that the census information is confidential. Also the Government probably knows about you than you know yourself. How do I know this? My old man use to work for the RCMP and he saw what capability and information the CPIC system had on ALL Canadians.