THE HISTORY OF CENSUSES IN CANADA

• Between 1666 and 1867, almost a hundred censuses were undertaken in various parts of what is now Canada.

• The Province of Canada started the practice of taking a census every ten years in 1851. Other provinces and the federal government gradually adopted that schedule.

• Taking a census every decade is required by Canada’s constitution. A reliable and frequent count of the population is essential to ensuring accurate representation in Parliament and in the provincial legislatures.

• Since 1956, a less-detailed census of Canada has been held every ten years, five years apart from the larger census.

• Census questions have changed regularly, depending on how interested policy makers have been in religious affiliation, ethnicity, language, education, employment, income, and other matters.

• All the information in Canadian censuses up to 1921 is now open to the public. Many censuses have been elaborately digitized and made searchable by genealogical services or by volunteers.

• In 2006, Statistics Canada declared that privacy law required it to destroy the raw data about individual Canadians in the census. Only the general findings will be preserved, and future researchers will not be able to consult all the small details of the 2006 census.

• In 2011, after complaints that the government was using the census to spy on Canadians, the detailed “long form” census was declared voluntary rather than mandatory, and many Canadians declined to complete it. Data from 2011 will need the kinds of revision and correction that Marcel Trudel gave to Jean Talon’s 1666 census.