MISSED ME AGAIN.

For some time now I’ve been going on about the census form and saying I had no intention of answering all the questions this year. I won’t go over it all, since a few of you expressed a fair amount of weariness with the subject, and one got fed up enough to tell me off in no uncertain terms. Nevertheless, I expect a few may be wondering what actually happened when I came to fill out the form. Well, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but nothing at all happened.

When the census came out this year we were in transition from our home in Edmonton to our new home in North Bay. We were visiting with my wife’s sister in Victoria, but on the actual day the form was to be filled out we were away in Parksville. When my sister-in-law filled out the form, because we weren’t actually there, she didn’t include us. So we are numbered among the thousands of Canadians who didn’t get numbered this year.

It’s all pretty anticlimactic, but it does make my point that all the fuss about the long form census this year, and the fear that the data would be compromised, was a lot of political hot air.

The census is of great value, not because it’s a perfect picture of the make-up of the country, but because, as a survey, it is hundreds of orders of magnitude more exhaustive than any other survey of the population. But, in the end, it is an approximation. Misinformation, disinformation and no information are just realities of life in the survey world.

If it bothers anyone that the census was a few ciphers out this year don’t worry about it. Nothing’s perfect. I know a man who has voted in every federal election for decades even though he’s never been a Canadian citizen. He says he’s just covering for one of the thousands of Canadian citizens who fails to vote. For every goofball like me who didn’t get counted someone who shouldn’t have been probably did. And once again we have a picture of the Canadian population that’s approximately perfect. That’s stats.