Analysis

Description: With an increase in the number of international students and a greater need for affordable housing, questions have arisen about international students housing experiences. This article examines international students’ prevalence of living in unsuitable housing across municipalities enumerated in the 2021 Census of Population long-form questionnaire. The report also presents the rates of unsuitable housing for international students from different source countries and provides comparisons with Canadian-born students.

Description: Selecting immigrants with high levels of education increases their chances of economic success. Immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher are more adaptable to changes in the labour market and have steeper growth in employment earnings than those with a trades or high school education. However, many immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher have occupations that underutilize their skills, which can reduce their employment income, productivity and well-being. This article updates previously documented trends in education–occupation mismatch with census data from 2001 to 2021.

Description: It is well documented that earnings vary considerably by population group (White, Black, Latin American, etc.). One of the possible reasons may be the fact that educational attainment also varies considerably by population group. Currently, there is a lack of information on the educational pathways of individuals from various population groups who began a postsecondary education program. This article fills this gap by documenting various aspects of the postsecondary experience of different population groups with regard to bachelor’s degree programs.

Description: The impact of immigration on the destination country is contingent not only on the number of immigrants admitted but also on how many of them choose to stay and actively engage in the labour market. This article analyzes the active presence of adult immigrants since the 1990s. Active presence refers to the extent to which immigrants who were admitted to Canada during a specific period actively engage in Canadian society within a specific timeframe.

Description: Headline inflation in Canada reached a 40-year high in 2022. Rising prices reduced the purchasing power of people whose incomes were not keeping pace with inflation and the current high inflation in Canada, as well as in many other countries, may be caused by both demand and supply factors. This article examines whether the current high inflation in Canada is demand–pull or supply–push.

Description: The pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the Canadian economy. This impact was uneven across different workers and businesses. However, there is little information available on how businesses were affected by and survived through the pandemic according to the characteristics of their owners, especially those owned by certain groups such as women and immigrants. This article uses a linkage of the monthly business openings and closures with the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy to study the survival rate and employment growth of businesses by gender, and immigrant status of owners.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This publication presents annual estimates of population for subprovincial areas of Canada, such as census metropolitan areas (CMAs), census agglomerations (CAs), economic regions (ERs) and census divisions (CDs). The following components of population change are also presented: births, deaths, immigration, emigration, returning emigration, net temporary emigration, net non-permanent residents and interprovincial and intraprovincial migration. The estimates are based on the most recent census of population results available at the time of publication, which have been adjusted for census net undercoverage (including adjustment for incompletely enumerated Indian reserves). This publication also contains highlights and an analysis of the most recent demographic trends, as well as a description of the concepts, methods and data quality of the estimates.

Description: Economic and Social Reports includes in-depth research, brief analyses, and current economic updates on a variety of topics, such as labour, immigration, education and skills, income mobility, well-being, aging, firm dynamics, productivity, economic transitions, and economic geography. All the papers are institutionally reviewed and the research and analytical papers undergo peer review to ensure that they conform to Statistics Canada's mandate as a governmental statistical agency and adhere to generally accepted standards of good professional practice.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This infographic provides details about the number of graduates and median employment income two years after graduation for international postsecondary students, by educational qualification and field of study.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Record linkage aims at identifying record pairs related to the same unit and observed in two different data sets, say A and B. Fellegi and Sunter (1969) suggest each record pair is tested whether generated from the set of matched or unmatched pairs. The decision function consists of the ratio between m(y) and u(y),probabilities of observing a comparison y of a set of k>3 key identifying variables in a record pair under the assumptions that the pair is a match or a non-match, respectively. These parameters are usually estimated by means of the EM algorithm using as data the comparisons on all the pairs of the Cartesian product ?=A×B. These observations (on the comparisons and on the pairs status as match or non-match) are assumed as generated independently of other pairs, assumption characterizing most of the literature on record linkage and implemented in software tools (e.g. RELAIS, Cibella et al. 2012). On the contrary, comparisons y and matching status in ? are deterministically dependent. As a result, estimates on m(y) and u(y) based on the EM algorithm are usually bad. This fact jeopardizes the effective application of the Fellegi-Sunter method, as well as automatic computation of quality measures and possibility to apply efficient methods for model estimation on linked data (e.g. regression functions), as in Chambers et al. (2015). We propose to explore ? by a set of samples, each one drawn so to preserve independence of comparisons among the selected record pairs. Simulations are encouraging.

Description: The authors used the Splink probabilistic linkage package developed by the UK Ministry of Justice, to link census data from England and Wales to itself to find duplicate census responses. A large gold standard of confirmed census duplicates was available meaning that the results of the Splink implementation could be quality assured. This paper describes the implementation and features of Splink, gives details of the settings and parameters that we used to tune Splink for our particular project, and gives the results that we obtained.

Description: Estimation at fine levels of aggregation is necessary to better describe society. Small area estimation model-based approaches that combine sparse survey data with rich data from auxiliary sources have been proven useful to improve the reliability of estimates for small domains. Considered here is a scenario where small area model-based estimates, produced at a given aggregation level, needed to be disaggregated to better describe the social structure at finer levels. For this scenario, an allocation method was developed to implement the disaggregation, overcoming challenges associated with data availability and model development at such fine levels. The method is applied to adult literacy and numeracy estimation at the county-by-group-level, using data from the U.S. Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. In this application the groups are defined in terms of age or education, but the method could be applied to estimation of other equity-deserving groups.

Description: In accordance with Statistics Canada’s long-term Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), several initiatives have been implemented into the Labour Force Survey (LFS). One of the more direct initiatives was a targeted increase in the size of the monthly LFS sample. Furthermore, a regular Supplement program was introduced, where an additional series of questions are asked to a subset of LFS respondents and analyzed in a monthly or quarterly production cycle. Finally, the production of modelled estimates based on Small Area Estimation (SAE) methodologies resumed for the LFS and will include a wider scope with more analytical value than what had existed in the past. This paper will give an overview of these three initiatives.

Description: Sampling variance smoothing is an important topic in small area estimation. In this paper, we propose sampling variance smoothing methods for small area proportion estimation. In particular, we consider the generalized variance function and design effect methods for sampling variance smoothing. We evaluate and compare the smoothed sampling variances and small area estimates based on the smoothed variance estimates through analysis of survey data from Statistics Canada. The results from real data analysis indicate that the proposed sampling variance smoothing methods work very well for small area estimation.

Description: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is committed to improving access to more microdata, while ensuring privacy and confidentiality is maintained, through its virtual DataLab which supports researchers to undertake complex research more efficiently. Currently, the DataLab research outputs need to follow strict rules to minimise disclosure risks for clearance. However, the clerical-review process is not cost effective and has potential to introduce errors. The increasing number of statistical outputs from different projects can potentially introduce differencing risks even though these outputs from different projects have met the strict output rules. The ABS has been exploring the possibility of providing automatic output checking using the ABS cellkey methodology to ensure that all outputs across different projects are protected consistently to minimise differencing risks and reduce costs associated with output checking.

Description: With the availability of larger and more diverse data sources, Statistical Institutes in Europe are inclined to publish statistics on smaller groups than they used to do. Moreover, high impact global events like the Covid crisis and the situation in Ukraine may also ask for statistics on specific subgroups of the population. Publishing on small, targeted groups not only raises questions on statistical quality of the figures, it also raises issues concerning statistical disclosure risk. The principle of statistical disclosure control does not depend on the size of the groups the statistics are based on. However, the risk of disclosure does depend on the group size: the smaller a group, the higher the risk. Traditional ways to deal with statistical disclosure control and small group sizes include suppressing information and coarsening categories. These methods essentially increase the (mean) group sizes. More recent approaches include perturbative methods that have the intention to keep the group sizes small in order to preserve as much information as possible while reducing the disclosure risk sufficiently. In this paper we will mention some European examples of special focus group statistics and discuss the implications on statistical disclosure control. Additionally, we will discuss some issues that the use of perturbative methods brings along: its impact on disclosure risk and utility as well as the challenges in proper communication thereof.

Description: The publication of more disaggregated data can increase transparency and provide important information on underrepresented groups. Developing more readily available access options increases the amount of information available to and produced by researchers. Increasing the breadth and depth of the information released allows for a better representation of the Canadian population, but also puts a greater responsibility on Statistics Canada to do this in a way that preserves confidentiality, and thus it is helpful to develop tools which allow Statistics Canada to quantify the risk from the additional data granularity. In an effort to evaluate the risk of a database reconstruction attack on Statistics Canada’s published Census data, this investigation follows the strategy of the US Census Bureau, who outlined a method to use a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver to reconstruct individual attributes of residents of a hypothetical US Census block, based just on a table of summary statistics. The technique is expanded to attempt to reconstruct a small fraction of Statistics Canada’s Census microdata. This paper will discuss the findings of the investigation, the challenges involved in mounting a reconstruction attack, and the effect of an existing confidentiality measure in mitigating these attacks. Furthermore, the existing strategy is compared to other potential methods used to protect data – in particular, releasing tabular data perturbed by some random mechanism, such as those suggested by differential privacy.

Description: Education and training is acknowledged as fundamental for the development of a society. It is a complex multidimensional phenomenon, which determinants are ascribable to several interrelated familiar and socio-economic conditions. To respond to the demand of supporting statistical information for policymaking and its monitoring and evaluation process, the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) is renewing the education and training statistical production system, implementing a new thematic statistical register. It will be part of the Istat Integrated System of Registers, thus allowing relating the education and training phenomenon to other relevant phenomena, e.g. transition to work.

Description: Growing Up in Québec is a longitudinal population survey that began in the spring of 2021 at the Institut de la statistique du Québec. Among the children targeted by this longitudinal follow-up, some will experience developmental difficulties at some point in their lives. Those same children often have characteristics associated with higher sample attrition (low-income family, parents with a low level of education). This article describes the two main challenges we encountered when trying to ensure sufficient representativeness of these children, in both the overall results and the subpopulation analyses.

Description:

The latest issue contains the article "Has the Clothing Industry adapted to the changing economic environment?" by Yasmin Sheik. The clothing industry consists of establishments engaged in the production of men's, boys', women's, and children's wear as well as furs, foundation garments, hosiery, gloves, sweaters and occupational clothing.

The clothing industry is labour intensive and requires only a limited number of special skills, and therefore it exists in almost every country in the world. In the past, developed countries, including Canada, restricted competition in this sector from low-wage developing countries by the imposition of country-specific import quotas. However, a change in trade policies has resulted in the reduction of trade barriers and increased competition. The Canadian Clothing and Textile industries now fall under the normal trading rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and World Trade Organization (WTO) besides being part of the North American rationalization process under the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the U.S. and Mexico.

Using data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures for 1988 to 1997, this paper will show how the Canadian Clothing Industry has adapted to the changing economic environment. It will also comment on the recent period of growth using the Monthly Survey of Manufacturing and other indicators.

Description:

The most recent issue contains "An update on the paper and allied products industry" by Gilles Simard. After a prosperous 1994 and 1995, and the brutal fall in 1996, the Paper and Allied Products Industry experienced a less turbulent period during the last three years. Prices have been relatively stable reflecting the slack demand for goods produced by this industry. The Asian crisis afflicted the West coast wood pulp producers while the demand for newsprint in the United States helped maintain activities in the East. This article, based on the results of the 1997 Annual Survey of Manufactures, briefly describes changes to the industry in 1997 and 1998, and looks at recent events in 1999.

Description:

The latest issue contains the article "Printing, publishing and allied industries: an overview" by Sharon Boyer. This paper provides highlights and an overview of the economic activity and contribution of the Publishing, Printing and Allied Industries Major Group 28, to the manufacturing sector and to the Canadian economy as a whole. The impact of international trade will also be examined.

Based on the results from the 1997 Annual Survey of Manufactures, but using information from other more current Statistics Canada sources, this article includes data from 1999.

Description:

The latest issue contains the article "The transportation equipment industries in Canada, 1985 - 1997 - A review of change". The transportation equipment industries are the largest industrial manufacturing group in Canada representing more than a quarter of the total value of manufacturing shipments in 1997. They include the manufacturing of a diverse range of products, ranging from aircraft to ships to automobile assembly to vehicle parts and accessories manufacturing. As well, the manufacturing activity also includes repairs to aircrafts, boats and ships.

Since 1985 these industries have experienced sustained growth in terms of total shipments as well as the number of workers employed. The hourly wages paid to workers are much higher than the average hourly wages for all manufacturing. The gap between the hourly wages of the workers in the automotive industry and the rest of the workers in the transportation equipment industry has been widening considerably since 1985.

The auto industry has weathered free trade with the United States without suffering the job losses or decreasing productivity that some analysts predicted before the agreement took effect. In fact, productivity has increased, as have incomes.

Over 70% of the output was exported, mostly to the United States. Given the sustained prosperity that the United States has enjoyed for more than a decade now, it is not surprising that the Canadian transportation equipment industries have also performed well.

Description:

The chemical and chemical products industry is one of the key manufacturing industries in Canada. In 1996, despite an increase in exports and in prices, the growth this industry has known since the beginning of the decade slowed down. This leading-edge industry employs a scientific labour force, which is not always associated with manufacturing.

Description:

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics has prepared a report on the use of remand in Canada. Remand refers to persons who have been charged with an offence and ordered by the court to custody while awaiting a further court appearance. This report uses data from the Adult Correctional Services (ACS) survey to assess the trends in remand admissions, sentence lengths, and average daily counts of remand inmates in provincial/territorial correctional facilities between 1988-89 and 1997-98. Characteristics of remand inmates (e.g., age, gender, marital status, level of education, employment), offences and criminal history were studied using data from the One-Day Snapshot report (a census of inmates on-register in adult correctional facilities on midnight Saturday October 5th 1996). Characteristics and offences of youth on remand in 1997-98 were also examined using data from the Youth Custody and Community Services (YCCS) survey. Trends in the average counts of youth on remand between 1988-89 and 1997-98 are presented using data from the Corrections Key Indicator Report. Appendices include graphs of admissions and average daily counts for each province and territory.

Description:

Heart disease and stroke are major causes of illness, disability and death in Canada and they exact high personal, community and health care costs. The goal of The changing face of heart disease and stroke in Canada, the fifth in a series of reports from the Canadian Heart and Stroke Surveillance System (CHSSS), is to provide health professionals and policy makers with an overview of current trends in risk factors, interventions and services, and health outcomes of heart disease and stroke in Canada.

Description:

These highlights provide a brief summary of the report "Inequalities in literacy skills among youth in Canada and the United States", the latest monograph released using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey. This report suggests that youth in North America do not fare as well in their literacy skills as their European counterparts. Variables such as income and education continue to have direct and indirect effects on people's literacy skills.

Description:

This report outlines some initial results from the School Component of the first and second cycles of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). It examines the longitudinal influence of Early Childhood Care and Education and literacy activities on young children's future academic and cognitive outcomes. This overview highlights the information newly available from this component of the survey; it is not comprehensive in its coverage or its analysis. Indeed, the information collected by the NLSCY is so rich and detailed that researchers and analysts will be using it to address a variety of important questions concerning the education of children and youth in Canada for many years to come. Here then, we are merely scratching the surface to stimulate awareness of this rich new data source, and to illustrate the kinds of analyses it makes possible.

Description:

This study was initiated to test the validity of probabilistic linkage methods used at Statistics Canada. It compared the results of data linkages on infant deaths in Canada with infant death data from Nova Scotia and Alberta. It also compared the availability of fetal deaths on the national and provincial files.