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An Open Letter from the Canadian Network of Metropolis Centers

Canada should keep its Census mandatory and maintain its status as a public resource

For more than a century, Canada has had two features in its Censuses that have enormous public value. First, all households have been required to fill out the Census, and for the past 40 years, a subset of households has been required to fill out a more detailed Census, called the -long form-. The long form responses represent our best data on small populations, including ethnic minorities, linguistic communities, immigrant groups and Aboriginal peoples, and so are vitally important to our collective growth and aspirations as a cohesive and diverse society. Second, all census data has been made public after 92 years. This makes it possible for individuals to trace their family histories, and allows historians to study Canadian society over long periods of time. Read more…

(from the CERIS listserv)

Dear TIEDI partners,

Many of you will have read about the federal government’s plan to convert the ‘long form’ of the 2011 census into a voluntary survey, thereby significantly affecting the quality of social data that will be available in the years ahead. I won’t elaborate on the reasons why this is a bad idea – there have been many articles in the press over the last few days that make a variety of points. Here are a few, in case you haven’t seen them already: Read more…