General Chat

I think that the only people to worry, will be the ones with something to hide, like who is shacking up with who?and who shouldnt be there anyway......
wonder if it will ask how many persons are living in the loft space?

Bob

I don't think they use it now to check up on people any more than they used it back in 1911 and earlier to check up on people. It is just a head count - the fact that it asks seemingly personal questions is to get a handle on what mixture the population is. That mixture covers age, sex, race, education, all sorts.

I think back in the 19th century it was more useful on info like age ranges etc - to see if there were enough workhouses, hospitals and (later) schools to cover the population ... Now the info is out of date fairly quickly but it still gives that snapshot once every 10 years.

If people are worried about it they can hide, or lie, just like some of our ancestors did. I don't suppose anyone will come knocking on their doors to check it out if they did!

Jill

All the questions mentioned in the OP, and more, are in the Canadian census survey and always have been. I'm not sure about number of bedrooms ... but I'm pretty sure number of bathrooms is!

It is all essential information for policy planning.

I like the religion part. I get to do my bit for upping the number of us non-believers every 5 years.

Interesting fact from our census is that Quebec, where people still overwhelmingly report that they are Roman Catholic, has the highest number of unmarried couples (including couples with children) just about anywhere in the world. ;)


Employees and managers are obviously bound by government privacy legislation, just like the people who process your tax returns and national health records ...

It's never totally accurate anyway.

Consider the number of people who declared their religion to be Jedhi in 2001, just for the heck of it, or students who ended up both on their parental home and on their 'Halls' or Rented house forms because the instructions were unclear.

In our 2006 mini-census, the vile Conservative govt contracted out the processing of the census forms to Diebold - *in the United States* - the same firm responsible for black box voting in the US, and all that.

Those of us who objected to the whole thing, and especially to a US corporation, and especially that one, being given our private info made sure our forms would not be scannable and would have to be processed by hand, hoping to make Diebold lose interest in the contract in future because of extra expense.

What you do is fill in the blocks for name and address upside down, and then spill coffee on the last page ...