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  • The Value of the Long Form Canadian Census for Long Term National and International Research
  • Lisa Dillon

The federal government’s decision in June 2010 to replace the long form Canadian census with the voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) was met with vigorous opposition. While the opponents unanimously denounced the voluntary National Household Survey on the basis that it would suffer from the differential (and largely unmeasurable) non-response of particular population subgroups, two further effects of this decision are worth discussing: the termination of a 154-year national series of modern nominal censuses and the elimination of Canada’s place in the International Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series (IPUMSi).

Preserving Canada’s National Series of Modern Nominal Censuses

The Canadian censuses of the new millennium provide essential, detailed data to research fundamental social phenomena such as the evolution of family composition, migration patterns, the integration of different types of immigrants into Canadian society, and disparities in living conditions. To truly capture the importance and scope of these aspects, it is essential to situate these patterns in their historical context by comparing census findings for the present to those for the past. Statistics Canada’s published research reports on Canadian social patterns are usually confined to recent decades. In contrast, in the United States, the Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) has made available harmonized US census data from 1850 to the present and has fostered extensive social science research situating US social patterns in the context of the entire twentieth century and last half of the nineteenth century. As a result, scholars such as Kathleen McGarry and Robert F. Schoeni, Steven Ruggles, and Joseph Ferrie have been able to explore the historic evolution of many behavioural patterns in the United States, such as the rise of living alone, the decline of multi-generational co-residence, and Americans’ decreasing capacity to climb the occupational ladder in the course of a lifetime.1

Owing to the existence of a strong tradition of census-taking in Canada, Canada also has the potential to develop a modern series of national, nominal census data. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Canadian government officials worked in consultation with their international counterparts to develop a standard, core set of questions that were repeated in different countries. These questions included name, sex, age, birthplace, relationship to the household head, school attendance, and occupation. To this core set, Canadian census officials added other questions, reflecting early on their intention to study economic development, the distribution of [End Page 389] ethno-religious groups, and health issues such as infant mortality and longevity. The shaping of the census through the addition and subtraction of such questions mirrored the preoccupations of the time. The mid-nineteenth century censuses asked city dwellers about the pigs, cows, and horses they maintained to understand the nature of urban subsistence, while the censuses for 1901 and 1911 asked year of immigration and nationality to ascertain the population of newcomers to Canada. By 1931 the census asked Canadians how many rooms were occupied by the family, whether the family owned a radio, whether the respondent was unemployed, and if so, the reason, permitting analysts to explore the impact of the Depression on standards of living.2 While the 1951 Census asked about veteran status, the 1971 Census once again asked the number of rooms in the dwelling and added questions on whether the household had a toilet or piped running water. During this time the core questions asked every decade expanded to include mother tongue, language spoken, nationality, class status, and earnings. As a result the Canadian national census has served as an important tool of population measurement, at once flexible and enduring, providing consistent information on a core set of socio-economic, cultural, and demographic questions, while integrating new questions to respond to researchers’ and other data users’ changing analytic needs.

For the past 20 years, various academic groups, genealogy societies, and Statistics Canada have forged mutually beneficial partnerships to transform Canada’s national series of modern nominal censuses into a harmonized research infrastructure that permits analysis across multiple decades. Scholars from the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, York University, the...

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