The CAIPS Retriever

Census 2006: Statistics Canada and marketing

Do you know that Census Day was May 16? Do you know why all that information is being collected? If you live in Canada and you do not know, it is because of Statistics Canada's botched marketing campaign. Statistics Canada missed to (repeatedly) inform us of two important aspects:

• The benefits of being counted in the Census;
• The legal consequences of not returning the completed questionnaire.

A simple carrot and stick strategy. Instead of creating awareness and thus improving response rates, Statistics Canada is now forced to spend on collecting questionnaires from an uninformed population.

Here is another example of unwise government spending. Three weeks after completing the questionnaire on the Internet, I received in the mail an unaddressed postcard abut "counting myself in". No household that had completed and returned the questionnaire should have received this card. Yes, it is about cut trees, underused computers and wasted taxpayer money. But, instead of learning from professionals how to do marketing, Statistics Canada imposes on marketing subcontractors to have experience in working with the government (or to be already imprinted by bureaucratic, inefficient work).