POST 1901 CENSUS PROJECT
Protect Canadian Census Records From Destruction
françaisThe following article by Graham Fraser appeared in the Globe and Mail 13 November 1999Expert panel appointed to study release of census informationGraham FraserParliamentary Bureau, Ottawa Richard Van Loon said yesterday that he will be taking an even-handed look at the issue of whether personal information in census data should be released after 92 years. Yesterday, Industry Minister John Manley announced that Dr. Van Loon, the president of Carleton University and a former senior public servant in the federal government, will head an expert panel on Access to Historical Census Records. “I really don’t have axes to grind,” Dr. Van Loon said, “I don’t have preconceived ideas of what the answer should be.” The panel also includes Chad Gaffield, director of the Instituted of Canadian Studies, Gérard LaForest, a retired Supreme Court judge, Lorna Marsden, president and vice-chancellor of York University, and John McCamus, a professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. Canadian historians and genealogists have been arguing that there should be an amendment to the Statistics Act that would allow census information to be released to the National Archives after 92 years. They say that the fact that Canadian historians have no access to the information collected after 1901 represents a crisis of scholarship. In 1906, Sir Wilfrid Laurier promised that the data collected in the special western census after Alberta and Saskatchewan become provinces would remain confidential. |
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