http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
by Alexander Howard, Senior Editor for Technology, The Huffington Post, August 18, 2015
Five years ago, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made participation in Canada's constitutionally mandated long-form census voluntary. The consequences of not requiring people to fill out the country's National Household Survey are becoming increasingly clear, and they're not good: Canadian citizens, reporters, businesses and government officials don't know how the country is changing. Fewer people respond to voluntary censuses, leading to spotty demographic data. As economics writer Ben Casselman reported at FiveThirtyEight.com, nearly three quarters of the residents of Snow Lake, Manitoba, didn't return the census form at all ( . . . )
Canada has been conducting a census since 1971, sending out both a short form and a long form. The short-form census poses 10 basic questions about the composition of households, including the number of people present, their age, sex, marital status and languages spoken. The long-form census -- the National Household Survey -- poses 53 more questions about demographics, activities, socio-cultural information, mobility, education, labor market activities, income, housing, childcare and household work, occupation and industry.
In the absence of this much richer data set, businesses know less about where to offer services, what to invest in or where to locate new stores, and they're not happy about the impact this lack of information is having on their competitiveness. Academic researchers have less insight into what's happening with immigration, public health and poverty. Government agencies can't measure the efficacy of their programs. And journalists can't cover the communities they serve as effectively ( . . . )
I asked Parliament member Tony Clement, the president of Canada's Treasury Board ( . . . ) whether he would urge Parliament to reconsider Canada's discontinuation of the mandatory long-form census. "We're at a stage where we can move beyond the old way of collecting information, and we have the tools to do so," Clement replied. "We can do so in a way that preserves privacy, we can go deeper than any long-form census can go." Clement also expressed concern about the civil liberties implications of personal data collection, echoing Harper's justifications for eliminating the mandatory aspect of the long-form census ( . . . ) While Clement implied the technology to collect "better, more accurate, deeper information" was available now, he offered no substantive plan or method that would replace a mandatory household survey.
Adopting new technology for the census could also raise new issues. Using websites or mobile devices for explicit or tacit data collection, for instance, could be more invasive with respect to privacy and civil liberties. There's also a risk of a bias towards counting people who are connected versus those who are not ( . . . ) Meanwhile, although hundreds of organizations and individual scientists and researchers have called for it, in June 2015 the Harper administration declined to add more questions to the next version of Canada's short-form census ( . . . ) Justin Trudeau, the leader of Canada's Liberal Party, has said that he'll bring the mandatory long-form census back if he becomes prime minister ( . . . )
