StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen

Makes sense, in terms of efficiency and potentially accuracy (i.e., income data from tax forms may be more reliable than self-reporting).

Ironically, given that it is essentially a “big data” approach, it could be more intrusive than the former mandatory census that the Government abolished citing its intrusiveness (and not mentioning less than a handful of complaints).

Information sharing and privacy will be the harder policy issues.

But good that this is being considered:

A virtual census relies heavily on administrative data: giant caches of information collected by government in the regular course of business.

Statistics Canada already uses 500 databases drawn from federal, provincial and municipal governments, and the private sector. Among many other things, those data files provide information on individual incomes taxes, corporate taxes, payroll deductions, employment insurance, building permits, births and deaths, even telephone bills.

A handful of European countries — Finland, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany — have scrapped their survey-based censuses in favour of population counts that rely heavily on an amalgam of administrative data. Sometimes, that data is combined with information from sample surveys.

“If you look around the world, particularly in Europe, you’ll see many countries have moved away from going out with a survey the way we do,” Smith told the Citizen.

“They’ve said there are data files available that we can use to effectively count the population: we don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and bother every household in the country to count the population.”

StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen.