Canadian Social Trends, Number 90 (11-008-X)
I love these magazines. These use to be disseminated at a cost. A few years ago, StatCan changed its cost recovery policies for its publications and now these are released for free. They are rich reports loaded with stories based on data collected by the agency. Of import, is the use of census metropolitan areas as a unit of analysis. The CMA, is a large geography and a construct of StatCan. What cities want is a smaller geography such as the actual administrative boundaries of cities and municipalities when comparing cities to each other. Often when StatCan reports on cities nationally, they use the CMA as do other agencies such as Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation. These are often misleading as the CMAs cover way more than a city and often include rural areas, in other cases, some cities fall within 2 CMAs. Finally, with the cancellation of the long-form census, we may be stuck with only CMAs as a way to look at cities as the sample size for cities may be too small. This means that neighbourhood analysis or sub-municipal analysis may become impossible. We may loose the ability to study the local, the community.
The Study in this report on outmigration to suburban areas might be more interesting if explored at that smaller scale, we may discover a neighbourhood to neighbourhood trend which makes tangible what is going on at a micro scale, and at the scale where people live. It is that type of analysis that may get lost, and that is most distressing, as we may loose the ability to study what is happening within our cities.
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Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
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