The new federal government's announcement Thursday that it was moving ahead with bringing back the mandatory long-form census next year was welcomed locally by those who rely on collected data.
The city's social planning manager said she was thrilled to hear the news, given an effort in recent years to ensure decisions are made based on good data.
"So policy decisions related to crime reduction, to social housing, to low-income matters," said Chris Bone. "We found that in the absence of the data that's generated through that (mandatory) long-form census, some of that important information that we need to make good decisions on social policy was no longer available."
The Regional District of Fraser-Fort George was also pleased to see the return of the mandatory questionnaire, said a statement from spokesperson Renee McCloskey.
"In the past, it has provided valuable information about our communities and has assisted in planning for our key services like solid waste management. Increased participation in the census process makes the data more meaningful and easier to work with."
The long-form questionnaire was made voluntary with 2011's National Household Survey (NHS), with the previous Conservative government citing privacy concerns.
It was a decision decried by the research community, and prompted the 2010 resignation of Statistics Canada's chief statistician.
The NHS was the largest voluntary survey ever conducted by Statistics Canada, getting sent to one-third of Canadian households as opposed to the one-fifth of households that were sent the mandatory questionnaire.
The 2011 survey had a response rate of 68.8 per cent, compared to the 94 per cent response rate to the 2006 mandatory census.
But in communities where less than half of those surveyed didn't participated, StatsCan didn't release any data.
That posed a problem for people like Laura Ryser, a research manager for rural and small town studies at UNBC.
The team led by Greg Halseth looks at changes within communities, specifically trends in things such as housing and economic development.
"So that meant that some small communities, they had no data released at all from the long-form census," said Ryser. "So when you don't even have any data, you have no way of using information to inform the planning that might go into infrastructure and services and programs and these sorts of things."
Port Edward, Port Clements and Masset were on the list of communities with response rates too low to garner a release of statistics and Hudson's Hope, Mackenzie, Granisle and Telkwa weren't too far behind.
Twenty-two per cent of those surveyed in Prince George didn't respond in 2011.
"The best thing with statistics is to have ones you can compare over time," said Coun. Garth Frizzell, who worked for Statistics Canada in the late 1990s. Frizzell, who sits on the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' board of directors said there was a ripple of excitement running through his local government counterparts across the country at Thursday's news.
"Today, Canadians are reclaiming their right to accurate and reliable information," said a statement from new Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains.
"With the 2016 Census of Population program, communities will once again shine more light on government to make sure it remains focused on the people it was created to serve."
The reliability of data is critical, said Frizzell, and when the city needs to access that data they want the evidence to be as reliable as possible.
"So when you take a gap in data, it hurts the reliability and you can't ever get that back," he said. "But we can go forward and we can build and at least the new long form census is going to be comparable to the data before the gap as well. That's a positive."
For example, the city is currently working with the Prince George Community Foundation on a vital signs report, measuring quality of life, said Bone.
"What we've discovered as we were working through some of the data sources (Wednesday) was that in the absence of the (mandatory) long form, some of the most important Prince George-centric data related to social matters was no longer available," she said.
That's not to say there's nothing governments and social agencies can rely on, said Bone, citing data collected by Northern Health, the RCMP, the university and community groups.
"But because Stats Canada had always been the foundation from which other data was built upon, its absence was really felt," she said.
