July 28, 2010

The Honourable Tony Clement
Minister of Industry
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Dear Mr. Clement,

The Canadian Anthropology Society/La Société canadienne anthropologie (CASCA) strongly urges you to reverse your government’s decision to cancel the mandatory long-form questionnaire for the 2011 census.

As the association representing over 500 academic and practicing Canadian anthropologists, CASCA has a mandate to support and advocate for the necessity of basic and applied research in anthropology and the social sciences. We are deeply concerned that without the mandatory longform questionnaire, significant and reliable benchmarks based upon carefully designed, internationally respected methodologies reinforced by longitudinal data collection and analysis will be lost. Many anthropologists rely on the data collected in the long-form to further explore the values and cultural and social fabric of Canadian life. In opposition to your July 27, 2010 testimony during the parliamentary hearings on your government’s decision, and using your own examples, for anthropologists the number of broken bathroom tiles and the amount of unpaid sick leave that Canadians take are, indeed, important markers of the complex social, economic and political dimensions affecting people in this country. Our ability to better understand the health and well-being of Canadians, their economic prosperity and their opportunities to advance is central to our mandate.

The long-form allows us to contrast and compare the descriptive, local insights gained from our ethnographic research against the extremely robust statistical data available from the census. In a country where there is, in fact, very little public oversight of national or local trends via access and linkage to administrative databases, the census remains our only viable option in crosschecking the qualitative research we do with Canadians across the country’s diverse communities. Our work, reinforced by reputable national statistics, serves to better understand Canadians and their relationships to health, work, family, neighbourhoods, governments and
citizenship.

On behalf of The Canadian Anthropology Society/La Société canadienne anthropologie (CASCA), I request that you reconsider your position on the mandatory long-form questionnaire.

Sincerely,

Janice E. Graham, PhD
President, The Canadian Anthropology Society/La Société canadienne anthropologie (CASCA)
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics
Professor, Dept of Bioethics and Dept of Pediatrics (Infectious Diseases), Faculty of Medicine,
Professor of Sociology & Sociology Anthropology, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University
5849 University Ave, C-315
Halifax, NS B3H 4H7
Voice: 902 494-1897
CASCA Web: http://www.cas-sca.ca/

cc. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe