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The Honourable Tony Clement
Minister Responsible for Statistics Canada
Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician Statistics Canada
Dear Sirs:
We are writing to you on behalf of the Canadian Association for Business Economics (CABE). As the executive of CABE, with the support of a majority of the Board, we wish to express our concerns about the planned changes to the Census of Population. We are particularly concerned about the loss of the compulsory census long form. Our concerns relate to three issues: data quality, cost and process.
Data quality is a prime requirement of all analysis. Achieving an extremely high response rate to those questions normally covered in the long form is vital for policy and business analysis. Decisions are made regularly by business and government about the location of resources and new initiatives based on the data in the long form. In our professional work, we are continually requested to analyze questions with a very fine level of geographic detail. Policy analysis and implementation at the regional and local level will be seriously impinged by the lack of accurate socio-economic data. The very high response rate from the census because of its compulsory nature allowed us to be comfortable with the quality of the information. A survey with variable and highly subjective response rates does not provide the same assurance. More importantly, the samples for specific business surveys are often developed with reference to the detailed information obtained through the long form census. In addition, the introduction of the new voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) will represent a permanent break in the data, because the new data collected from the NHS will not be directly comparable to the more accurate data that had been collected from the long form of previous censuses. This will limit our ability to accurately track important long-term socio-economic trends.
As noted, our second concern is cost. This has three dimensions. Firstly, achieving adequate quality and an appropriate response rate from a survey will be very challenging and will almost certainly involve more resources than retaining the compulsory long form of past censuses. Secondly, the costs of maintaining existing programs in business and government will be increased because of the need to fund new data sources. Thirdly, high quality regional data at the municipal level will be seriously compromised, if not lost entirely in many parts of the country. This will require the development of alternative data sources with an enormous analytical and resource cost as well as a loss in comparability.
We also have a concern about process. As a professional association, we are quite concerned that the decision to drop the long form was made without serious consultation with the broad population of data users in the demographic and economics communities. As organizations, CABE and its various chapters have strong ties to the government and its data gathering agencies. We have provided a forum for Statistics Canada and other federal departments (including the Bank of Canada) to review and present studies and data. As professional organizations, we feel that we have improved the dialogue between government and the private sector which, in turn, has improved the quality of the public data. The lack of consultation over this significant change to the Census is an unfortunate departure from this mutually beneficial partnership. We strongly urge the government to reverse its decision to eliminate the Census long form.
If you have any questions, you can reach our board through the CABE web site at www.cabe.ca. Mr. Jacobson can be reached at 416-868-1141 or
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. Mr. Alexander can be reached at +1 (416) 982-8064 or
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.
Sincerely,
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Craig Alexander
President CABE
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Paul Jacobson
Vice President
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