Maxime Bernier was Minister of Industry during the 2006 census, and he's now saying that he received many complaints: As industry minister during the 2006 census, Bernier said he was inundated with privacy complaints over a five- to six-week period. "I received an average of 1,000 e-mails a day during the census to my MP […]

The announced reasons for making the 2011 census long form voluntary is that it is 'intrusive' and that it is 'coercive' to make it mandatory. If this were the the position of a principled, reality-based libertarian government, then it would be a powerful argument. But it isn't.

This post was written by Kevin Milligan of the Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia. I'd like to add something to Stephen's "Blame Stats Canada" post from yesterday about the government's response to the Census imbroglio.

This is interesting: [Industry Minister Tony Clement] added that he took the privacy concerns to Statistics Canada and asked they be incorporated into the next census. “They gave me options and we chose one of those options,” he said. “This is a methodology that Statistics Canada offered to us and if it's good enough for […]

There have been occasions over the past couple of weeks where I've regretted the somewhat combative tone of my first census post. One of those times was this morning, reading Bill Robson's mild rebuke of the decision to make the long form voluntary. He suggests that critics might do better to try to engage the […]

One of (many!) unpleasant implications of making the census long form voluntary is its effects on how data are tracked through time. Between censuses, Statistics Canada does the best it can to keep track of changes using survey data, but there's always the risk of sampling error accumulating as time goes on. The census – […]

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that the idea of sending out a voluntary long form in next year's census is a bad idea. Since this seems to be a file to which I will be returning from time to time, here are a couple of points to consider:

There is no exaggerating the boneheadedness of this decision:

It's time to update my series of posts (2009Q1, 2009Q2, 2009Q3, 2009Q4) in which I try to take the GDP numbers from the first two months of a given quarter, mix them with the LFS numbers from the third month, and boldly produce what Statistics Canada dares not attempt: a preliminary estimate for quarterly GDP […]