Daily BrewCount the calls to bring back Canada’s long-form census
If you accessed the Internet in Canada on Wednesday, you probably noticed a news story or two about the 2011 National Household Survey, the “spam email” replacement to Canada’s long-form census.
Results released on Wednesday were the first batch to come after the death of the mandatory long-form census, which was killed by the Conservative government ostensibly because we shouldn’t be forced to share our personal information with anyone, even if it is used anonymously by your government to form appropriate public policy or, y'know, understand stuff.
Most, if not all, of the reports on the voluntary survey came with caveats about the quality and usefulness of its results. At the least, they would include cautions that this year’s results shouldn’t be compared to census numbers of the past.
[ Related: One in five Canadian residents were born elsewhere: survey ]
In short, the National Household Survey is the government-issued equivalent of those Facebook messages you have to forward to 10 friends, lest suffer a spate of bad luck.
Here are some takes from across the country.
Michael Den Tandt, Postmedia News:
What a pity the numbers can't be trusted. What a shame they are, in fact, to be interpreted with great caution - not because of accident or oversight, but by the express intent of their sponsor.
One can only imagine the hair-tearing at StatsCan, as the more than 1,700 fulltime employees who worked on this project struggled to paint a useful and accurate portrait of the country, with one hand behind their backs and a leg encased in cement.
“It’s like a black hole — we don’t know anything about what’s going on in a certain community,” Rafael Gomez, a professor of industrial relations and human resources at the University of Toronto, told CTV News.
Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star:
It is a mark of how secretive the prime minister is that two years after the fact we still do not know why (Stephen Harper) killed the mandatory long form census that used to be sent to a fifth of Canadian households.
Was it merely his libertarian instincts that government ought not to intrude in people’s lives (even though it does in a million ways, from collecting our taxation information to personal background for security purposes)?
Or was it, as critics alleged, part of his systematic assault on scientific and statistical data, so that he could make decisions on ideology and personal whim rather than evidence?
“It boggles my mind in the data-driven 21st century that we would have a government that would choose to know less about its citizens, and about its needs and about getting good data about what people are struggling with,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau via Canadian Press.
[ More Brew: Survey has trouble counting Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples ]
Philip Cross, Research Co-ordinator at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, via the Globe and Mail:
The problems with the NHS data at a micro level is already evident in today’s release (see Appendix 3 of Chapter 5 on data quality), and will be further revealed over time. One metric will be how much small-area data Statcan had to suppress to avoid publishing flawed estimates.
…
It is not enough to criticize the NHS data and leave it at that. Analysts have to be creative in finding alternatives. There is no shortage of data in our world, most of it much more timely than the census.
“Perhaps the data will be somehow useful. Perhaps the concerns raised are even somehow rash. But then the available data on complaints about the 2006 census might still leave questions about whose privacy was imperilled and why we now find ourselves having to go forward with “pretty solid” information.” – Aaron Wherry, Maclean’s.
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