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Re: conservatives world wide are cancelling censuses!

Posted by Tracey P. Lauriault on Feb 28, 2015; 7:58pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/conservatives-world-wide-are-cancelling-censuses-tp7187p7197.html

Yes John there are issues, but we are in quite a pickle in Canada at the moment, as we spent a ton on a survey that is considered to be of very low quality and no information on small areas.  That is troublesome indeed.  I see your point on the complementarity of other datasets, but we do not have such a system at play in Canada, unlike the Scandinavians, that is an old infrastructure of registries.  Ours took a different path.  But we know that data on the filling out of the census and the filling out of the long-form survey are not aligned with your anecdotes of a time gone by with your colleague.

Cheers
t

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 7:44 PM, john whelan <[hidden email]> wrote:
From memory one basic idea is we (the government) have a lot of interaction with the population.  So driving licence data is fairly current and that covers a lot of people, renewal every five years seems common.  We have tax return data, etc etc.

Just data mine it and you get a surprising amount of data and with the new anti-terrorist legislation there is less objection to combining data on privacy grounds.  Even in Canada some government data bases are combined for a specific application, this was actually approved by the privacy commissionaire.

Is it any less accurate than the census?  Well to a conservative government does it matter?  If there is no data then you can make decisions, currently they don't rely on civil servants to research etc anyway or certainly to the extent that we saw in the past.  The census in any case is three years or so out of date on average anyway so from a data quality point of view it isn't quite as nice as we'd like it to be.  Give me access to the provincial and municipal data bases as well as the federal ones including the tax data bases and I think the accuracy would be better.

Having worked at Stats on the census I once asked one of my staff who was unmarried had he filled his census form in yet?  "No, they aren't interested in me."  was the reply and they worked on the census so what hope for the rest of the country and its the ones who don't answer you're most interested in.

Cheerio John  

On 28 February 2015 at 13:49, Michael Gurstein <[hidden email]> wrote:

Tks David,

 

Can you point to a place where there is a discussion/critique on censuses from a “conservative” perspective?

 

M

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eaves
Sent: February 28, 2015 10:21 AM
To: civicaccess discuss
Cc: Canadian Association of Public Data Users
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] conservatives world wide are cancelling censuses!

 

The short answer to that is yes. There are several conservative "think tanks" and gatherings that advocate this move. If it feels coordinated (that word might be too strong), it's because it is. 

--

@daeaves

Sent from my iPhone


On Feb 28, 2015, at 10:18 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

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