City protests census change

Richard Rolke - Vernon Morning Star Published: August 12, 2010 6:00 PM

The City of Vernon is joining the fight against Ottawa over the census. Council will fire a letter off to the federal government demanding that the long-form census be reinstated. “According to all of the experts, including our own economic development officer, they get a lot of information from the census,” said Coun. Bob Spiers. “Without it, the data won’t be as accurate.” Federal officials have stated the mandatory long form contains information that is intrusive on Canadians’ lives, but Spiers doesn’t believe that is enough reason to completely scrap the census process. “Perhaps the questions could be changed but to do away with the mandatory aspect of it, makes it less effective,” he said.

The lone opposition to writing Ottawa is Coun. Mary-Jo O’Keefe. “The long-form census has a lot of information that is private,” she said. O’Keefe also takes issue with Canadians being forced under law to fill out the census, and if they don’t possibly facing jail time or fines. “Citizens shouldn’t be mandated to sign the long form,” she said. Kevin Poole, economic development officer, believes Vernon’s planning initiatives could suffer if the long-form census is scrapped. “Without the long form, we don’t have access to labour force data. We also can’t get information on income levels,” he said. “Without it, it will be difficult for communities to determine what their strengths and weaknesses are economically.” Poole says many companies consider census data when looking for towns to invest in. “A company wants to compare apples to apples between communities,” he said. “They want the data to be the same and the majority of the data comes from the long-form census.”

MP Colin Mayes defends the government’s actions. “The issue for us is there are threatening messages on the forms. If you don’t fill them out, you could be jailed or fined,” he said. “We don’t want to make it compulsory.” Mayes believes shifting from a mandatory to voluntary form could prove beneficial for collecting statistics. “There may be a better response if we’re not being aggressive,” he said. Mayes also says that he isn’t hearing from constituents about the issue. “I’ve got about three e-mails on it. If all we’re doing wrong as a government is the census form, then we’re doing a good job,” he said. On Wednesday, the federal government announced that two questions revolving around languages will be added to the short-form census, and legislation will be introduced eliminating the prospect of jail time for people who don’t fill out mandatory surveys.