The Politics of the Census: Lessons from Abroad
I late June, Minister of Industry Tony Clement announced the government’s decision to eliminate the mandatory long form of the 2011 Census and replace it with a voluntary survey to be sent to one-third of Canadian households. The decision was reportedly made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper last December and has largely been framed by Conservative cabinet ministers as an important change to safeguard the privacy of Canadians. They maintain that the state has no business in the bedrooms of society, or, more specifically, that the state has no business asking Canadians how many bedrooms they have in their places of residence. The Prime Minister ’s Office has stated, “The government made this decision because we do not believe Canadians should be forced, under threat of fines, jail, or both, to disclose extensive private and personal information” (Valpy 2010). Clement, the minister responsible for Statistics Canada, argued before a parliamentary committee on 27 July that though the information gathered in the long form is “valuable,” a “balance must be drawn” between collecting data and the privacy rights of Canadians.
Guest editorial: the 2001 UK census: remarkable resource or bygone legacy of the ‘pencil and paper era’?
National censuses are expensive. They are conducted infrequently. They collect information that some feel infringes their human rights, and people are required by law to complete them. The outputs are not perfect, and in some situations may be misleading. Some suggest that censuses hark back to a period when regularly collected administrative data were not available. These are some of the views held about national censuses. Why, then, would others argue that they are an essential resource? In this paper, we consider some of the pros and cons of conducting national censuses, before introducing a series of papers that draw on early data available from the 2001 UK census. We argue that these papers, and the wealth of research that will be conducted in the future with 2001 census data, make a strong case for supporting the compulsory collection of personal information about the ‘entire’ population every ten years.
Environmental education in Latin American and the Caribbean: the challenges and limitations of conducting a systematic review of evaluation and research
Abstract This systematic review extends the boundary of prior reviews in the environmental education (EE) field by analyzing publications focused on Latin America and the Caribbean (LATAM). We examined peer-reviewed literature and dissertations/theses in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) published between January 2000 and February 2018 to examine outcomes of EE interventions occurring in both formal and nonformal settings among LATAM youth up to age 18 years. Our findings reflect recurring critiques of EE, such as the field’s limited empirical research and a bias toward measuring knowledge gain. Our findings also highlight themes specific to LATAM, related to issue-based EE programs, EE versus Education for Sustainable Development, barriers to EE implementation and potential challenges posed by bias, privilege and power in LATAM-based EE research. Access to potentially appropriate publications was limited by weaknesses in search databases. Only a small selection of LATAM countries is represented in publications that met the search criteria, limiting our capacity to draw stronger conclusions about the region as a whole.