Statistics Canada says one of its biggest challenges is making sure everyone is counted in the census.
Statistics Canada says one of its biggest challenges is making sure everyone is counted in the census.
Geoff Bowlby is the director-general responsible for census and population for StatsCan.
He said it can be difficult to track down the homeless population to record in the census.
“There’s no database at Statistics Canada that says here are all the people in the country follow up with them but we do have a database of addresses and dwellings and so we’re dwelling-based. We send the invitations to the home, we knock on the door of the home in order to enumerate. That leaves a challenge in those who don’t have a home,” he said.
Bowlby said it can be difficult to find the majority of the homeless population.
“We do go into places like shelters. There are organizations across the country, some of them municipal, some of them provincial, some of them run by care organizations that house homeless people and we go to all of those. Every single one of those shelters, we will enumerate,” he said.
Bowlby said it’s difficult to measure where someone resides especially if they have a cottage and a usual address and move between the two.
“You also have circumstances where you have children in joint custody, for example, they can sometimes be a fuzzy area. Where do they usually reside if the custody is 50/50 or there are students who are away at school? These are some of the hardest parts of enumeration,” he said.
Bowlby said there are rules and procedures to follow to try to count everyone in the right place, but he noted Canada isn’t the only one experiencing this difficulty, citing similar issues in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Information from the census is used in a variety of ways, from determining where to place a new school, hospital or police station, to determining the amount of any money transfers sent from the federal government to provincial and territorial governments based on each person in that area. Vaccine rollouts during the COVID-19 pandemic are also based on census data.
