Statistics Canada wants you to help count Canadians in the upcoming census.
The agency put out a call for supervisors and enumerators this week as part of its preparations for the 2011 census. The census, held every five years, collects basic data on Canadian households that are used to determine transfer payments, electoral boundaries and federal policy. It officially kicks off May 10.
The census will be distributed to every home in the nation, said regional director Lise Rivais, and will take months to compile. The agency will need to hire about 3,900 people to survey Alberta alone, including 17 in St. Albert and 26 in Sturgeon County.
The census asks the same eight questions about age, gender and relationships as it did in 2006, Rivais says, plus two new ones on language.
New this round is the National Household Survey, a 70-some-item questionnaire that asks detailed questions about ethnicity, education, income and other topics. The survey asks the same questions as the old long-form census, except it’s voluntary and will go out to one in three homes.
Census packages will go to every home in the country starting May 3, Rivas says. About 60 per cent will get a letter with instructions on how to fill out the census online or get a paper copy; the rest will get paper copies. Residents then have until the end of July to complete the census by mail, phone, online or (in remote areas) in person.
Local enumerators will fan out to check in on anyone who hasn’t filled out the census a few weeks later. “You have to have some skills in speaking with people,” Rivas says of the job and you have to be able to read a map.
The short-form census is mandatory, Rivas says, and anyone who refuses to complete it could be fined $500 and/or jailed for three months under the Statistics Act. No one ever has, since the department doesn’t enforce that part of the act. “We rely on the good will of people,” she says, which usually results in about a 90 per cent response rate.
The census wraps up on July 29, with the first results due out next February. For details, visit census2011.gc.ca.
