Statistics Canada has sent out its 2021 census, and people in Yorkton should have seen the form arrive by now.
The yellow form will have a 16-digit secure access code that residents can use to visit the census website and then select the start questionnaire button to fill it out.
If you haven’t received the form yet, Sri Kanagarajah, Assistant Director Western Region & Northern Territories, said that people should call 1-855-340-2021.
Kanagarajah said that people don’t have to worry about filling out the form wrong this time as they have put a system in place to limit errors. He also noted that there are two types of questionnaires that people could be filling out.
“Everybody will get a short questionnaire, but 25 per cent of the population will get the long-form. There is a lot of other questions in terms of ethnicity, employment, there are questions about their income, their education, and so those are some examples.”
Kanagarajah said that a census is an essential tool that all forms of government use.
“It’s used for transferring money from the federal government to provincial, and then provincial to municipal. The federal government collects the taxes and based on head-count a certain amount of money is transferred to the province based on health, education, and various other things.”
“It’s also used for building roads, building schools because the population is growing, so we need more roads, we need more schools. To be able to serve people in a population growth area, the more accurate information we have allows the provincial and municipal governments to determine how many services they have to offer,” Kanagarajah continued.
He noted that the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines used census data to determine the population by age group and how many vaccines a certain area needed.
“The other important information is for the First Nations people. It looks at the social-economic changes over time and immigrants coming into the country, and their assimilation into the labour force to make sure they are contributing to the labour force and the economy,” he added.
Kanagarajah said that overall they are looking for over 80 per cent of Canadians to fill out the questionnaire online, an improvement of 68.3 per cent of the country filling out the questionnaire online in 2016.
He also added that he hopes Canadians will fill out the census or phone if they haven’t received one, so Statistics Canada doesn’t have to follow up with people to make sure their census is completed.
