BR Newsletter

For the last 14 years I have assisted many new entrepreneurs and small businesses with their market research. One of the most utilized market resources is the Census.  The advantage of the Census is that it allows a small business to assess its local market with reliable data at a reasonable cost.  Much of the data is available free of charge.   This essential information helps to ensure your business is being launched or expanded on more than just a hunch.

For those with privacy concerns it should be noted that this data is only numerical in nature.  Individual names and addresses are not accessible from the Census.  It is not a mailing list.

The proposed removal of the long form from the Census is a foolish one.  The long form data is essential for not only new entrepreneurs but for businesses of all sizes,  as well social groups, community organizations, municipal, provincial and federal governments and yes even the political parties who use local Census data to strategize for their re-election campaigns!

Industry Minister Tony Clement is naive to think that the new survey will garner more responses because it is distributed to more households.  The Survey of Household Spending (SHS), a detailed voluntary consumer expenditure survey from Statistics Canada garnered an average national response rate of 63%.  This rate applied to the new voluntary survey proposed to replace the long form would produce fewer responses than the actual Census.

What makes the voluntary survey especially troubling is the inevitable regional variation in response rates.   At a provincial level the SHS response rate ranged from 57.2% in Alberta to 71.3% in Newfoundland & Labrador.   This type of variation will be even more dramatic from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.   A voluntary survey will not provide the same quality of data at a local level.   Information at a DA level will not be possible.   Future business decisions, social and government policies will be based on insufficient data.   One of the greatest benefits of the Census is the insight it provides at a neighbourhood level.  This will be lost for no apparent reason other than a cabinet whim.

Industry Minister Tony Clement comments that fears are “overwrought”.  Perhaps it is his  government that is “overwrought” with concern about potential Census protests and so feel the system that has been in place for 35 years should be changed without thought or public consultation.   When I worked at Statistics Canada during the 1996 Census there were numerous people who came into the Toronto office concerned about filling out the Census.  Some were extremely angry.   Yet once it was explained why the Census was taken and what the information was for, they filled out their forms without further distress.  I did not threaten people will jail time or place them under duress, I simply explained the rationale behind the questionnaire.

The payback from detailed Census data collected once every five years from one in five households is enormous.  All Canadians benefit.  The removal of the long form is a very short-sighted and foolish policy decision.

I just uploaded a new Stats Pack.  You can access it here.  It covers the following topics:

Given the number of entrepreneurs that were deflated by the recession, one has to wonder about the long-term outlook for entrepreneurship in Canada. The wind was definitely taken out of a lot sails. Hopefully people are simply waiting for “better weather” and have not given up entirely!

The Internet can be a frustrating resource. There is constant pressure on webmasters to update their web sites and keep them current. While this is a wonderful imperative it can lay waste to otherwise useful content because it is arbitrarily deemed “too old”. It is estimated that the average lifespan of a web page is 45-75 days.  It is very likely that information you find useful today will not be accessible in 3 months..

Over the last 14 years I have watched as fantastic collections of information have vanished overnight. If information was valuable enough to be published in the first place, it should be given some regard at “update time”. Happily I am not alone in my opinion and efforts are being made to preserve an archive of the Internet.

Google itself offers a short-term solution to recently deceased pages. In the Google results page you will see in the bottom line of each citation a link called “cache”. This is a snapshot of the page the last time Google crawled the site. Given the frequency with which Google crawls the Internet these cached pages are usually no more than a few days old.

The Internet Archive is the most ambitious attempt to archive online content. The site collects publicly available Internet documents using a web crawler. You cannot keyword search the archive but if you know the website you are interested in you can search on the URL. The results will provide you with a list of archived dates available. By clicking on the dates you can access the content as it appeared at the time referenced.

Be forewarned however, sometimes authors and publishers express a desire for their documents not to be included in the archive either by tagging a file for robot exclusion or by contacting the Internet Archive directly. Therefore this resource does not always yield results.

The Canadian government has taken a more thorough approach to archiving its own content. Their strategy is based on two sites.

The first is the Electronic Collection which consists of books and periodicals published online in Canada by both government and non-government publishers. All Canadian publishers are required to deposit copies of their online publications with Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Currently the composition of the collection is 68% federal government, 29% commercial / non-commercial sources and 3% provincial government.

You can keyword search this resource to located documents. It is not only useful as an archive but it provides access to current online publications as well.

The second resource is the Government of Canada Web Archive. This site provides an archive of federal government web sites as a whole. You can search by keyword, by department name, and by URL. The archive however does not provide any content beyond pages requiring user input such as a search screen to a database or content requiring the user to pay.

The pages within the archive are clearly tagged with a bright green bar across the top so that you are well aware that you are looking at an older version of a web site. It should be noted that the content in this archive cannot be accessed via Google.

When you subscribe to our Stats Link Canada Source Lists we provide you with free archive services. If you come across a dead link, simply report it to us along with the reference Stats Link ID.  We will first search for a new live link for you. If that does not exist we will recover an archived copy of the poll, survey or report referenced and e-mail it to you.