Negative Impacts to the loss of the Long-Form Census in Social Services - Children

Via: Peel Consortium

Data on people living in low income, particularly children, will no longer be available in great detail. This will diminish the ability of municipalities and school boards to adapt or target their programs and services to low income families.
- EXAMPLE: School boards have already raised their concern that there will be less data on children living in low income which will negatively impact their planning process to implement early years programming and build new facilities in high-needs areas. This will result in the Region of Peel having to find less reliable or less detailed data on vulnerable groups. This affects not only the planning of schools, programs and services, but also our advocacy efforts and research initiatives that aim to find meaningful ways to reduce rising poverty levels in our Region.

The lack of detailed information on children, such as income, languages spoken, visible minority status, immigrant status, education of parents, religion, and other variables will result in a severely reduced ability for municipalities to address socio-economic disparities and adapt services to an increasingly diverse population. This is particularly of concern to the Region of Peel, which boasts Canada’s largest proportion of visible minorities and second-largest proportion of immigrants, as the Region will find it increasingly difficult to plan for services to an increasingly diverse and growing population. The Region will also be hampered in its efforts to effectively monitor trends related to increased poverty and difficulties faced by certain groups.
- EXAMPLE: The Status of Children report, published by Success By 6 Peel, will no longer have as much reliable, accurate, and valuable data to assess the quality of life of children in Peel and what gaps need to be addressed.

Overall, the planning and forecasting of human services and facilities for children will be greatly hampered by the absence of the mandatory long-form census. The lack of reliable detailed information on population sub-groups will result in less effective planning and delivery of programs and services that children and families so greatly depend on. Regional staff will no longer be able to conduct trend analysis and therefore will find it more difficult to identify emerging trends and challenges that require immediate action. This will impact the effectiveness of regional initiatives and make it more difficult to plan and deliver programs and services that meet the needs of our diverse population.
- EXAMPLE: The Peel Children and Youth Initiative will identify population results and indicators to track the quality of life of children in Peel. With the absence of the mandatory long form census, PCYI efforts will be hampered and these results and indicators will be difficult to monitor. As a result, one consequence is that the Region will find it more difficult to determine if children are ready to enter grade 1 and identify ways to further improve this readiness.