Liza Bolton: Census detectives

Liza Bolton

The following activity is from a sample seminar with my STA497 students on 2021-11-17. It was intended as a model seminar for their own upcoming seminars about topics from Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West (see: https://www.callingbullshit.org/) and covered more than just this activity. You can access the slides below

Useful links

PDF version of activity
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Slides (warning, spoilers!)

Background¹

The Constitution Act of 1867 set out the requirement for a census of the population to be taken every 10 years. The first of these decennial censuses took place in 1871 in the four original provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick). The most recent of these censuses was conducted in 2021.

A note on langauge

There is some language in these censuses that is outdated and can be offensive. These terms are used only in the context of the historical documents from which they have been drawn, and seek to illustrate the development of our social understandings of identity. If you’d like to learn more about the history of these terms, The Canadian Encyclopedia may be a useful place to start.

‘Eskimo’: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/eskimo
‘Indian’: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indian-term

Task

Complete each of the following census questionnaires about yourself. (Note, these are not the complete census forms, these are questions about sex/gender, age, and race/ethnicity. These questions have been retyped and somewhat reformatted, but the original text has been preserved. Once you have completed the forms, try to put them in chronological order from oldest to most recent census.

PDF version of activity

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WARNING: You’ll see answers if you keep scrolling

Solutions

A = 1996
B = 1921
C = 1871
D = 2021
E = 1951

Something that I particularly love is that if you ordered these samples from shortest to longest, you have the order from oldest to most recent. I think this is a good indication of how our understanding of identity has become more complex, but also probably that our ability to manage and aggreagate data has improved greatly.

‘Clues’, comments & points of interest

Useful source: Guide to the Census of Population, 2016, Chapter 2 – Census history https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/ref/98-304/chap2-eng.cfm

2021 was the first census to include questions about both gender and sex, specifically defining sex as sex assigned at birth.
Prior to 2001 data was not collected on couples other than heterosexual couples.
- Notice the change from “live together as husband and wife” in the description of common-law in 1996 to “live together as a couple” in 2021’s description.
- Older census forms don’t account for common law relationships, and the heads of the house will always be men in a marriage (‘wife’ as a relationship to head option, but not never ‘husband’).
For the 1951 census a new punch card technology was used make data tabulation faster. That is why the age is set up to record 10s and 1s in the way it is.
Nunavut wasn’t a territory until 1999 and so is not listed in the 1996 census.

What else did you notice? Let me know! @Liza_Bolton