Census
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The Government of Canada has decided that, for the 2011 Census, it will no longer be mandatory to complete the Long Form Census Questionnaire, which until this point has been distributed to one house in five, every five years. The mandatory Long Form will be replaced by a voluntary National Household Survey.
Without the guarantee of randomness the mandatory Long Form provided, many statisticians are gravely concerned about the sampling bias stemming from a voluntary questionnaire completely eroding the validity of the measures being collected. Read more ...
There are only 6 data questions on the Short Form (opens PDF): age, sex, mother tongue, marital status, common-law status, relationship to others in the household. The remainder of the measures come from the Mandatory Long Form (again, opens PDF).
In order to demonstrate which measures will be affected by the cancellation of the Mandatory Long Form Census, I've modified the elements below to show which census form they came from: the Short Form or the Long Form.
If you would like to sign a petition to Save the Mandatory Long Form Census, please click here. For more information, please visit the datalibre.ca website. To see the history of which questions have been asked in what census, please see this compendium published by the University of Toronto library (h/t Stephen Gordon at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative).
While this website does not endorse any political party, and tries very hard to remain neutral and non-partisan, it does occasionally take positions on issues in the democratic sphere. I take the position that more valid data is better. If you don't, you should recognize how much it would harm your use of this website over the long-term. Show less
