May 5 marks Red Dress Day across Canada, a day to both remember missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people and to take action to raise awareness and, ultimately, make a change.  A report from Statistics Canada in 2023 found that between 2009 and 2021, Indigenous women and girls were six times more likely than non-Indigenous women and girls to be murdered.  It also found that police were less likely to recommend a first-degree murder charge — about 27 per cent of the time — if the victim was Indigenous, compared to non-Indigenous victims — about 54 per cent of the time.

Read more.

Like damn J-dawg, you’re coming at me right outta the gate.

In its long-form census, completed every 10 years, Statistics Canada asks Canadians what their religion is “even if no longer practicing.”

This has the effect of creating an inflated impression of religious adherence and practice in Canada.

Independent surveys typically find a greater percentage of Canadians do not identify with a religion.

E.g. According to Statistics Canada, 44% of British Columbians had “no religion” in 2011 but when asked whether they practice a religion or faith, 69% answered No to a 2016 survey by the BC Humanist Association and Insights West.

The Hazy Economy of Cannabis

When Canada legalized recreational marijuana, a team of statisticians set out to decode how much exactly the weed business is worth

Apart from hammering out semantic protocols, StatCan faced two central hurdles in determining how to count cannabis: How much do Canadians use? And what does it cost? But the economists at StatCan wanted to calculate those numbers not just for the final quarter of 2018, when cannabis became legal, but for every year back to 1961, which is as far back as the national accounts go, at least in their current form. The reasoning was that cannabis amounts to an uptick of about $6 billion a year in economic activity. Without adjusting backward, it would seem as if Canada had had an unusually great 2018, an accounting offence StatCan’s economists couldn’t countenance.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

The country added a net 320,000 new jobs, almost all of them ― 283,000― full-time, according to Statistics Canada data. To cap off the run, December saw Canada’s jobless rate drop three notches to 5.6 per cent as the country added an unexpectedly large 35,000 jobs.

An article in the Toronto Star reporting on a Statistics Canada finding that more and more people are learning their Indigenous languages later in life. Excerpt: 

Using 2016 census data, Statistics Canada reported that between 1996 and 2016, Indigenous first-language speakers dropped by one per cent. But over the same period, there was an eight per cent climb in fluent, second-language speakers. [...]

When her students went home and spoke Cree to their parents and grandparents, the old words would spark new life and interest in a language that some had nearly forgotten, or buried deep inside as she once had done.

“The elders and the parents, they would come to me and shake my hand and thank me for teaching their children and their grandchildren because their grandchildren were going home and talking Cree to their grandparents,” Kiskotagan said. “That makes it worthwhile, and I love teaching especially the little ones, because they teach their grandparents and their parents.”

Collins, L. (1972). Industrial migration in Ontario; forecasting aspects of industrial activity through Markov chain analysis. Ottawa: Regional Statistics Research and Integration Staff, Statistics Canada.