Social Policy in Ontario

Long-form census crucial to understanding povert

Posted on January 31, 2015 in Inclusion Policy Context

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LFPress.com – Opinion/Letters/Vox Pop
January 30, 2015.   Don Kerr and Barbara Decker Pierce

Has the incidence of low income increased in your neighbourhood? Statistics Canada can no longer tell you

On Wednesday, MP Ted Hsu’s private member’s bill to reinstate the Canadian long-form census is up for vote in the House of Commons.

In our role working with the newly established London Poverty Research Centre at King’s University College, we would like to urge Londoners to support this important initiative.

The mission of the centre is to assemble research on poverty in London and to inform governments and the public about its findings to improve the local policy and program response. With the decision to eliminate the long-form census, we have lost an important source of reliable information on the economic circumstances faced by Londoners.

In 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper replaced the traditional long-form census with a voluntary survey that cost taxpayers $22 million more and produced inferior data. In reaction, more than 400 organizations (public, business and non-governmental) have gone on the record in opposing this costly decision.

We would like to add the London Poverty Research Centre at King’s to this long list. Groups as diverse as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United Church of Canada have all been calling for a fix.

As was predicted by StatsCan, the quality of information coming from its voluntary survey would seriously fall short of a mandatory census. It is no wonder that the chief statistician of Canada, Munir Shiekh, resigned when the Harper government imposed this decision on Statistics Canada.

Social scientists have long understood that less educated Canadians, recent immigrants, lower income persons, aboriginal Canadians, young adults living alone, and persons with only a cursory knowledge of either English or French are more difficult to reach through standard survey research. This is exactly why the census is so useful. It collects detailed information on specific neighbourhoods, and the data is of high quality due to its mandatory nature.

Over the past 20 years, London and Southwestern Ontario have seen a massive shift in labour market conditions: decline of manufacturing and accompanying loss of good-paying full-time jobs, offset to some degree by creation of part-time and time-limited work. At the London Poverty Research Centre at King’s, we are interested in documenting the impact of these changes, and how specific city neighbourhoods and communities have been faring.

To what extent has the incidence of income poverty worsened or improved in the Old East? How is London’s inner core doing relative to the cities newer suburbs? How are neighbourhoods in south London faring relative to those in the north? How has the Kipp’s Lane neighbourhood fared in comparison to communities north of the river or west of Adelaide?

It will be much more difficult to answer these important questions by using the Canadian census data. The movement toward a voluntary survey has led to a much higher level of non-response, which leads to uncertain biases in documenting change. This is despite Statistics Canada’s considerable expertise and best efforts.

A voluntary survey can never replace a mandatory census, and the analysts and statistical experts at Statistics Canada know this better than anyone. Let us support Hsu’s private member’s bill to reinstate the long-form census for 2016

Don Kerr is a professor in the department of sociology and Prof. Barbara Decker Pierce Director is co-chair of London Poverty Research Centre at King’s and director of the school of social work, both at King’s University College.

< http://www.lfpress.com/2015/01/30/long-form-census-crucial-to-understanding-poverty >

Tags: budget, housing, ideology, immigration, Indigenous, multiculturalism, participation, poverty, standard of living

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