Statistics Canada

Federal Government Dept: Statistics Canada has now released the first instalment of the data from the 2011 Census that took place in May of last year. These data relate to population and dwelling counts. Further instalments of data related to age and sex of the population, families, households and marital status will be made available through the year, according to Vancouver Sun. For the 2011 Census, the federal government decided to eliminate the long-form census that had 53 questions while maintaining the short form with eight questions. Two questions on language that were previously in the long form were added to the short form. Still being a census, the short-form questionnaire remained mandatory. The quality of the short-form data being released starting Wednesday, therefore, should be broadly as good as that released from the previous censuses and there is considerable interest in Canada on census issues, as became quite obvious during the controversy over the long-form census in the summer of 2010, which led me to resign as chief statistician of Canada. From 1971 to 2006, the census included two parts: the short form and the long form. The short form included questions of a tombstone nature with the main objective being a head count. The long form included the remaining questions that were focused on getting respondents' socio-economic information in areas such as the labour market, income, transportation, education, disabilities, housing, citizenship and ethnicity. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.