Ottawa

The collection of numbers by the numbers (II)

The Industry Minister has claimed that 160,000 Canadians “refused” to complete the long-form census in 2006. Statistics Canada now says 275,000 households failed to return a short-form census and 160,000 failed to return the long form, but only that census officials were unable to “make contact” with the majority of those households.

If a breakdown of the reasons for not responding exists, I’m not aware of it. (Requests for information in this regard have so far failed to produce a response.) It was reported in 2008 that 35,000 Aboriginals had refused to participate in the process. And there was something of a campaign to boycott that year’s count on account of Lockheed Martin’s involvement.

As noted previously, roughly 10.9 million households in 2006 received the short form, while 2.7 million received the long form. The response rates then were 97.5% for the short form and 94.1% for the long form.

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