Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/2/2011 (3514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE provincial government plans to spend up to $400,000 over the next five months to persuade Manitobans to fill out next spring's federal census forms and avert what one expert warns could become a "statistical catastrophe."

The province's chief statistician told a CMHC housing outlook conference Tuesday the government could be facing everything from reduced federal transfer payments to a shortage of accurate information on which to base critical spending and policy decisions, if not enough Manitobans fill out the forms.

And it's not just governments that could be hurt, Wilf Falk said. Businesses and social agencies also rely on census data when making key decisions about their operations.

"We could get a misleading picture," he said in an interview. "If 50 per cent or lower (fill out the forms), what have we got? There is the potential here for a statistical catastrophe."

He said the problem is that, for privacy reasons, it's no longer mandatory that Canadians fill out the long-form census, which includes detailed questions about things like ethnicity, income, education, country of birth, occupation and how many hours are spent caring for children.

They're only required to fill out the shorter form, which asks basic questions about things like date of birth, marital status, first language and the ages and genders of people living in a household.

Falk said the fear is with the longer form no longer mandatory, too many Manitobans won't fill it out. So the survey could produce misleading information about things like population growth, which is used to determine the size of federal transfer payments.

"We have the potential here to lose money," he said, which is one of the messages the government hopes to get across in its multimedia advertising campaign.

"We need to encourage Manitobans to fill them out."

Much of Falk's address to about 200 government, housing and mortgage industry representatives dealt with population growth and the impact that can have on the local housing market.

He said Manitoba is doing better than many people realize when it comes to economic and population growth.

"There's a new Manitoba out there," he said, noting it's had the highest average annual economic growth rate in the country over the last five years at 2.1 per cent. And last year it had the highest annual influx of immigrants since 1946.

He said the Manitoba Bureau of Statistics projects that over the next decade, the province's population will grow by an average of 20,900 people a year, including about 16,000 new immigrants annually.

It estimates that by 2020, Manitoba will have a population of 1.45 million versus 1.24 million today. And Winnipeg's population will grow to 802,000 from 687,000.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca