“Joe Canada” is increasingly likely to be Jose, Youssef or Josipa Canada, with our nation now boasting the highest proportion of foreign-born citizens of the G8 countries: 20.6 per cent.
His – or her – daily commute takes 25.4 minutes, all from the comfort of a car – 74 per cent of us drive to work – to perform a job acquired on the steam of post-secondary credentials (nearly two-thirds of Canadians aged 25 to 64 have them). The reward for this full-time, year-round employment is a salary of $47,900, with males generally commanding 26 per cent more than females for the same amount of work.
Of course, much of that income is consumed by a mortgage: 59 per cent of homeowners pay one. But the new face of Canada is nonetheless grateful, and expresses as much in prayer – unlike the one quarter of citizens who profess no religion.
We know all this thanks to the National Household Survey, the results of which were released in three waves throughout 2013. Despite widespread criticism around its voluntary nature – the NHS replaced the mandatory long-form census in 2011 – the survey’s 2.65 million responses still provide a striking snapshot of Canadian life, according to many experts.
“The devil is in the details but if you’re a big-picture person, you can wipe the sweat off the brow,” said Jack Jedwab, executive vice-president of the Canadian Institute for Identities and Migration (CIIM). “On both the national and provincial scale, I think (the NHS) caught the broader trends.”
Across all three releases of data by the survey, diversity was clearly the main theme. And although this stretched beyond obvious cultural connotations, to include everything from diversity of religion to workforce demographics, immigration was certainly the biggest part.
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A citizenship ceremony in Toronto on February 8, 2011.
May’s release showed that in 2011, foreign-born citizens numbered 6.8 million, making up fully one in five Canadians – the highest proportion the nation had seen in 80 years. At the same time, second-generation Canadians – those born in Canada with at least one foreign-born parent – accounted for 17.4 per cent of the population.
Kevin McQuillan, a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, said the findings will likely be a yardstick for immigration policy going forward.
“We need the best data we can get to understand how immigrants are adapting, and to assess whether the policies we have in place are the right ones – both for the country that’s accepting people and for the newcomers who are arriving,” said McQuillan, who specializes in demography.
Also notable was the rise of Canadians professing no religious affiliation: 23.9 per cent, versus 16.5 per cent a decade prior. In addition, the NHS reported a decline in the proportion of Christians, from 76.6 per cent to 67.3 per cent since 2001.
CIIM’s Jedwab said the figures are “relevant to the types of debates we’re having in Canada right now about the place of religion” in public life, as well as those around census criteria for which questions in future should be voluntary and which should be mandatory.
“We need to justify why some things are considered private while others are not,” said Jedwab, pointing to religion for the former and language for the latter. “There needs to be a genuine national discussion about it, and we need to do it reasonably soon.”
In June, the big news from the National Household Survey was gender shifts in education.
For the first time, a larger share of working-age females than males boasted post-secondary qualifications: 64.8 per cent vs 63.4 per cent. That gap widened further among young Canadians, with women accounting for nearly six in 10 adults aged 25 to 34 with a university degree.
Also noteworthy was the fact baby boomers were delaying retirement at a much higher rate. In 2011, 18.7 per cent of the working population was over 55, compared to 15.5 per cent in 2006 and just 11.7 per cent in 2001.
Transportation data revealed that more than nine in 10 people commuted to work, with 74 per cent using their own vehicles to do so. Public transit proved less popular, at 12 per cent, perhaps due to longer travel time: 40.4 minutes for bus riders, 44.6 minutes for subway users, and 52.5 minutes for light rail, streetcar or commuter train passengers, versus private vehicles’ 23.7 minutes.
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Traffic congestion during the afternoon rush hour in Vancouver, July 10 2012.
In September, the most contentious of the three NHS releases – on income and housing – was published. It showed the median household income for families of two or more to be $76,600 for 2010, while Canadians living alone saw a median income of $28,200.
Just 10 per cent of Canadians had incomes totalling more than $80,400 in 2010, while to be in the top five per cent, Canadians required earnings of $102,300. So-called “one percenters” saw incomes topping $191,100 – nearly seven times the national median.
But incomparability with historical data, lower response rates from smaller geographic areas, and stark differences with the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics and the T1 Family File mean critics regarded the NHS as wasteful, unhelpful and potentially dangerous to public policy.
“We actually ended up spending more for poorer quality data,” said sociologist McQuillan, referring to the $22 million excess used for the NHS in 2011 over 2006, for a total census cost of $652 million. “It was like going to buy a new car, then deciding you wanted a used car instead but paying more for it.”
Doug Norris, a leading census expert and chief demographer at Environics Analytics, argued that the data is far from useless. He noted that findings at the national, provincial and cross-sectional levels – particularly on gender, cultural diversity and education – were no less valuable than those retrieved from similar large-scale surveys widely used by scholars.
However, Norris did lament the loss of comparability over time, and noted that the problem will persist if methodology is again revised for 2016.
“Never before had anyone in the world done a voluntary survey like this,” said Norris, who spent nearly 30 years at Statistics Canada. “Many commentators suggested what would happen – and, for the most part, they were right.”
All of which will be important as we try to understand the “Joe Canada” of the future.
mharris(at)postmedia.com
NHS by the Numbers
Immigration and Religion
6,775,800: Canadians in 2011 who were foreign-born
1,162,900: Foreign-born people who arrived in Canada between 2006 and 2011
13: Ethnic origins, out of more than 200 reported, that surpassed the one million mark
6.5: Percentage of immigrants that could not speak either official language
36.6: Percentage of Canadians overall who could hold a conversation in more than one language; among foreign-born, was 74.5 per cent.
22,102,700: Canadians affiliated with Christianity, the largest faith in the country
7,850,600: People with no religious affiliation
Education, Labour and Commuting
11,782,700: Canadians aged 25 to 64 with post-secondary qualifications
64.8: Percentage of females with post-secondary credentials, versus 63.4 per cent of males
18.7: Percentage of workforce over age 55
32.6: Representation of women, in percentage form, among Canadians 25 to 64 with a university STEM degree (science, technology, engineering, math)
75.3: Employment rate for Canadians aged 25 to 64
74: Percentage of commuters who drove their vehicle to work; another 5.6 per cent made the trip as passengers
12: Percentage of commuters who used public transit for largest portion of their commute
1.1: People, in millions, who worked from home most of the time
25.4: Average commute to work, in minutes
29.1: Percentage of commuters who left for work between 7:00 and 7:59 a.m., the most popular window for such trips
Income and housing
1.1 trillion: Total income collected by Canadians 15 and older in 2010
$53,000: Median income for year-round, full-time male workers
$42,200: Median income for year-round, full-time female workers
67.1: Percentage of “one percenters” with a university degree, compared with 20.9 per cent of all Canadians aged 15 and over
69: Canadian home ownership rate, in percentage form
59.2: Home ownership rate for Canadians aged 30 to 34, versus 44.1 per cent for those 25 to 29 and 23.8 per cent for under-25s.
3.3 million: Number of Canadian households that spent 30% or more of their total income on shelter costs
58.6: Percentage of owner households with mortgages
1.6 million: Households in condominiums (roughly 1.2 million owners, 461,215 renters)
– Source: Statistics Canada National Household Survey
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