Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Personally it made sense for Harper to do away with it as if you're not going to use it, why have it? The cost associated was somewhat ridiculous though.
I will be interested to see the cost of going back to the former system.
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I assume you are referring to the long form census, so I just wanted to give my opinion from a health policy and working in a data driven organization.
I can say (and it's my opinion as I'm not allowed to represent my organization) that the elimination of the long form was a significant set back in collecting statistics and information for policy purposes.
The purpose of the long form census was to gather a wide set of data on all aspects in a standardized manner, and make it available to a large assortment of government and NGO policy organizations to inform decision making.
The census was unique and important in a few aspects. For one, it was highly disseminated and reached most of the population. It also lead to very high level of accurate survey responses, which is a quality that's very difficult to do when collecting information. Secondly, you can link postal code to the the questions to create population data, which is really useful as it allows comparability between one geographic region to another.
The questions may seem absolutely random to the average citizen, but when Statistics Canada breaks it down and provides it to other organizations, the data is incredibly useful for a large number of purposes.
For example, in another thread a poster mentioned why the government cared about whether someone had difficulty moving around in their own home. Well that data can inform whether a renovation tax credit would be effective or to inform the development of PSAs, and provide evidence on whether there is a need to improve home care.
There are other questions that looked at migration patterns, sociological information such as the division of labour at home for instance.
Before the elimination of the long form census, government organizations could also apply to include specific questions which would help generate policy decisions.
Since the elimination of the census, the biggest gap in information is in regional comparisons. My specialty is in Health, and I know that provinces had tried to make their own surveys to gather the information they need that they use to get from the census, but there was no standard between provinces to allow for comparisons. It is also a very resource heavy task to design and develop the questions, create a database and storage of the information collected, go through the regulatory and privacy requirements, and ultimately disseminate and collect the information and ensure a healthy response rate. At least with health, we have other sources of information we can use (hospital administrative data, patient feedback forms, drug data..etc) and the resources to gather the information we need. But for other areas of public policy, the census was their main source of population data.
TL;DR
Very happy the census is coming back and that it can only lead to better standardized data, which can lead to good decision making, and ultimately that benefits all Canadians
LChoy