Thanks for the reminder, Mona Lisa Simpson, I filled mine out just now.
Amusing that, immediately after I state (and it confirms) that my children are 6 and 8 years old, it asks what their marital status is (yet, on the same page, it didn’t ask if they were married to me, only had that option for my wife)
Your “bring back the long form” comment prompted me to say the same in my comment field, might not ahve thought about it had I filled it in when I wanted to.
The long form isn’t gone. It’s just been made voluntary, which will skew the data it collects in ways that could only be determined if you already had access to unskewed data.
This. It is definitely an incentive. We have also told him he can only go to La Ronde if he learns French.
Bump to remind Canadians that today is the day. Make sure you fill out your census (Damn Annie’s Song again) cause its the law!
My husband hid the census form so I only found it this morning (he dropped the mail from that day in a new and obscure spot) so I filled it out during my last meeting. I got the long form and had to text my husband for answers a couple of times and it still only took 20 mins.
Having established “Jedi” as a religion, perhaps we could establish “Wookiee” as a language…
Those who work with statistical data know that the data collected in this “voluntary” way will not be comparable to the data that was collected previously. Essentially, the government has screwed up a data set that goes back to 1871. And we don’t even know exactly how the data is screwed up. Just that it is.
I got the long form as well (“The National Household Survey”). It took about 20 minutes to fill out, and wasn’t particularly intrusive. It it had questions geared towards infrastructure and commuting - the condition of our home (needs no/minor/extensive repairs) and things like what time we leave home for work and how long is our commute home in the evenings. These are things that actually aren’t available from other sources, unlike things like our salary, which they have anyways through our tax papers, but now this information can be linked to income.
I think I read somewhere that anyone could voluntarily fill out the survey if they wanted to, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, unless I’m not seeing it on the StatsCan website. If you aren’t required to, but you get the option to, please do fill it out - it will benefit you and other Canadians to do so!
I also think the mandatory long form survey should be returned. This information is too important to have. It’s interesting to me that StatsCan basically says that they don’t know how long it might take to validate the data - the voluntary nature of it means that all kinds of factors need to be considered that weren’t considered before.
The more I think of it, the more I worry that this data will be about as valid as an SDMB survey. I hope not!
I thought that’s what I said. 
I was just responding to statements that seemed to be saying the long form was gone completely, not just made largely worthless.
Hmmm . . . after the census person gave a census form to my neighbour last week who gave it to me, this week I received a reminder notice in my mail box requiring that I complete the census form. What’s with these people that they couldn’t have simply mailed me the form in the first place?
I swear my thesis supervisor was ready to shoot himself in the head when the decision was made to scrap it. He does A LOT of work with census data in the urban planning field.
Errr ya. I was just re-stating it in a more confusing way for everyone. 
I have no doubt that a few responses will list “Klingon” as a language used in the home.
Most likely in Waterloo, Ontario, I’d guess. 
Maybe, but did you see job creation numbers from April? The Census is a make work project, to some degree.
Fewer census workers needed due to the online version being available, but StatsCan does have some permanent employees that they need to keep busy, so they make them drive out to the middle of nowhere to contend with long addresses and barking dogs? That’s my WAG.
Mr. Mallard just started working for them yesterday, and it should last through the summer. I don’t know how much work there is, but there’s some. (So if you live in Vancouver, could you hold off on your forms until nagged? Thanks.)
Ours is all done. That wasn’t too painful. I expected ambiguous, hard to answer questions like when I renewed my passport.
I did ours on-line on the weekend.
Morceau de gâteau.
The admission requirements for my degree there required two second languages. FORTRAN counted as one of them. Seriously.
I graduated from the U of Minnesota and they would count music as a second language.