Canadian demographics

Canadian Census of Population

http://www.census.gc.ca

• "A statistical portrait of the country"
• Every 5 years (quinquennial!)
• Most recently in 2016
• 100% of households surveyed:
  • 75% short-form survey
  • 25% long-form survey

Short form data

• date of birth and age
• sex
• relationships of household members
• knowledge of official languages
• language spoken most often
• other language spoken regularly
• first language learned

Long form data

• Everything from the short form, plus:
• activities of daily living
• sociocultural information
• mobility
• place of birth
• education
• labour market activities
• housing

Income data

• Drawn from 2015 personal income tax and benefits information
• Way more accurate than self-reported income

Data granularity

Aggregated by geographic area: country, province,

• census divisions (CD) - groups of municipalities
• census subdivisions (CSD) - municipality
• census metropolitan areas (CMA) - 100,000+
• census agglomeration areas (CA) - 10,000+
• dissemination areas (DA) - 400 - 700

Launch

URL: http://www.census.gc.ca

GeoSearch

GeoSearch

1. Drill down to DA level - note the names!
2. Click a DA for high level details (population, dwellings, area)
3. Scroll down to Results and click 2016 Census Profile
4. It's a wonderland of data!

Filtering data

• Default view of All data is… a lot
• Select a view lets you filter to just one category of data

Comparing geographies

• Your selection is compared against Canada by default
• Change geography lets you compare to province or other census dissemination area (CD, CSD, CMA, DA…

Download the data

• CSV is available for the compared geographies…
• Or all DAs in a given province (these files are huge and need special processing)