Liberals resurrect long-form census
Sixty-one-question form axed by Tories to return in 2016
OTTAWA— The portrait of Canada is being restored.
Just a day after taking office, the Liberal government announced Thursday that the mandatory longform census — axed by the Conservatives in 2010 — will be reinstated for the 2016 census.
“Today, Canadians are reclaiming their right to accurate and more reliable information,” said Navdeep Bains, the newly named minister of Innovation, Science and Development.
With the next census, communities will “once again have access to highquality data they require,” said Bains, the MP for Mississauga-Malton.
He portrayed the decision as the first step of the Liberals’ commitment to “open and fair government.”
The announcement rolls back one controversial decision by Conservatives and one that prompted critics to charge that the Stephen Harper government was turning its back on fact-based decision-making.
During the census — done every five years — most Canadian households get an eight-question form. However, a longer, more detailed, 61question form was distributed to one in five households.
With questions on everything from income, cultural heritage, education, work habits, even details of where people live, it gave researchers a rich source of data to build an understanding of Canadian society.
The data was used in myriad ways, planning everything from public health to transit and rural development.
“The use is almost never-ending,” said Ian McKinnon, chairperson of the National Statistics Council, the senior advisory body to the chief statistician at Statistics Canada.
Yet in 2010 that lengthy census form was scrapped by the Conserva- tives, who said its questions were intrusive, even though the data is kept confidential.
The Conservatives replaced the long-form census with a voluntary “National Household Survey” for the 2011 census. A poor response rate in some geographic areas and among some segments of society has lead to problems with the data.
And Bains said Thursday that the voluntary survey actually cost an estimated $22 million more than the mandatory form it replaced, even though it delivered poorer results.
That’s in part because the survey went to more households — one-inthree. Bains was reluctant to discuss the penalties for those who fail to fill out the mandatory forms, saying only “the law is the law.”
McKinnon said the data produced by the mandatory long-form census is “more robust” than the voluntary survey.
While he said Statistics Canada worked “extraordinarily hard” to make the survey data “as useful as possible” it was no longer as trusted as the benchmark for the Canadian statistical system.
Conservative MP Tony Clement, who was the minister in charge of Statistics Canada at the time of the 2010 change, appeared to express some regret for the move Thursday.
“Looking back on it, I would say that it would have been better to have a much broader review of data collection in our country and come up with a better system,” he said. With files from Joanna Smith