For DW members living in Canada's National Capital

I feel like the past few weeks have been consumed by doing my duty to God, the King and my country and abiding by the Girl Guide law. Specifically: filing income tax, completing the Census and buying Girl Guide cookies, in roughly descending order of onerousness.

But today I plan to talk mainly about the Census. There are two versions: the short and the long. And this year's long census, which we got, felt very long indeed. Apparently one in four households get this version. Looking back at my old blog entries, I see we got it in 2016 too, although we got the shorter one in 2021. Sadly, my blog only starts in 2012, so I have no verifiable record of what we got in 2011. Although, if memory serves me correctly, that may have been the year the obligatory long form census was canceled by the Stephen Harper government because two or three households in the country had complained about it. It was made optional - for EVERY household, I think - and my feeling was that if only those out-there folks who WANTED everyone to notice them were responding, then it would hardly be a statistically relevant sample and I'd rather not participate. Even so, I think I recall getting periodic nagging that we hadn't yet answered all those extra questions! Then again, my memory and my understanding of statistical processes might well be faulty as I don't claim to be an expert in these matters.

So, I don't know ... seems to me we've gotten a little more than our fair share of long-form censuses (censi? censos?) over the years but I guess it's the luck of the draw.

On a more positive note, I do think it's a good idea to collect the data included on the longer census. To quote the letter they sent in the mail: "Census information is important for you and your community and is used to plan services that support employment, schools, public transportation and hospitals." The new questions about homelessness and precarious housing arrangements were particularly interesting and timely in this day and age.

So far, so good, although given the recent rash of layoff notices at Statistics Canada and the seeming disinterest of our current globe-trotting Prime Minister in his own country-people (let alone his own constituency-people), I'm rather sceptical that many of these fine plans will see the light of day. I mean, Failing to Plan may well be Planning to Fail, but Planning to Do is not necessarily Doing the Plan!

The home page for the Census assures us that completing the questionnaire is quick and easy. Yeh, right.
In an interview with CBC, the Chief Statistician estimated it would typically take about 25 minutes to fill in the long form. I'd put it at closer to an hour for us, a 2-person household. Larger families would take much longer.

The main problem for us was that we didn't know what information we would need to have close at hand in order to answer the questions. Stuff like how much we spent on electricity, water, and property taxes. It meant saving our answers and coming back after retrieving all the receipts. Before logging out, we had to set up a password and a security question (the latter never got asked), and then we had to log first into My HydroOttawa and then MyServiceOttawa to retrieve the information we needed, and then go back to the Census questionnaire to input it.

Then there were the questions that really called for some soul-searching like what's your religion and what's your sexual orientation, but given the time constraints, our souls didn't really get fully explored and the process had to be curtailed a bit.

So here are some suggestions for developers of the 2031 Census:

1) Let us know up-front if we've been assigned a short-form or a long-form Census

2) Especially with regard to the longer Census, tell us what sort of documentation we ought to assemble before we log in: housing costs, health documents, educational credentials, etc.

3) Give us more time to get our answers in. I'd say at least two weeks rather than one. We received the letter (via snail-mail, which is getting less reliable) on May 5 and were told to submit the thing by May 12. But May 12 is the actual Census Day and a number of the questions refer specifically to the state of affairs as of May 12: it's a snapshot of the Canadian population on that date. So I think we ought to get at least a week BEYOND May 12 to finalize our answers, since technically we can't really even know if our answers were accurate until that date has passed.

I hope they will indeed compile some lessons learned and take people's concerns and suggestions into account. We'll see.