Last Tuesday, Statistics Canada released much of the data from the 2011 census and the results, as always, are fascinating.

Over the past 15 years — since census 1996 — Calgary and Edmonton have been the country’s two fastest-growing major cities. Calgary has grown by 47%, Edmonton by 34%.

Other large cities haven’t been far behind. Over the same period, Toronto has expanded by 31%, Vancouver by 26%, Ottawa by 23% and Montreal by 14%.

Nearly seven of every 10 Canadians live in one of the country’s 33 largest cities, while 35% live in one of its three largest cities — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

The population is shifting westward, too. Just since 2006, we’ve grown from a country of 31.6 million to one of more than 33.5 million.

But for the first time ever, a greater percentage of Canadians (30.7%) live west of Ontario than live east (30.6%) of it.

Interestingly, while our country grew by a robust 6% from the 2006 census, that rate does not approach the 8% growth between the 1986 and 1991 censuses, the 10% between 1961 and 1966 or the staggering 13% between 1955 and 1961.

We are accepting record numbers of new Canadians, but as a portion of our population growth, we have yet to hit the highs we experienced immediately after the Second World War as refugees escaped the devastation and deprivation of Europe.

We’re also an aging country. There are more Canadians aged 65 and over than ever before — more than five million — an increase of 14% from five years ago.

It is politically and economically significant that the total of working-age Canadians (15-64) grew just 5.7%. That is the group paying most of the taxes to fund the benefits consumed by the burgeoning ranks of seniors.

Working-age Canadians now make up just 42% of the population, and only about two-thirds of them are working.

So it will get harder and harder in the near future for taxpayers to sustain our social safety net.

But to me, the remarkable thing about Tuesday’s data release is that there was anything useful at all in the results of the 2011 national headcount.

Remember the hue and cry in the summer of 2010 when the federal Tories announced they would no longer make completion of the long-form census mandatory?

Canadians would no longer be threatened with huge fines and even jail time if they refused to answer the intrusive, one- to two-hour National Household Survey.

You would have thought our social sky had fallen.

I never thought the move would have any meaningful impact.

And even if it had, the citizen’s right to privacy trumps StatsCan’s desire to pry, anyway.

Still, the opposition parties called the move “mindless” and insisted it proved the Harper government was “anti-science.”

Experts were recruited from the United States to tell the Toronto Star and the CBC that the Tories’ move would “lower the quality and raise the cost of information.”

Editorialists opined that the government’s assault on the purity of the census would undermine public policy formation and “hamper Ottawa’s ability to solve social problems.” (As if it had done such a smashing job up until then).

We were told it was Canadians’ “civic duty” to comply with government demands for information about ethnicity, education level, sources of income, types of housing, number and ages of children and their activities, sexual orientation, family relationships, divisions of household labour, recreation and so on.

If they wouldn’t comply, it was legitimate to force them to — indeed, it was vital to the well-being of the nation.

But as Tuesday’s release demonstrates, that kind of talk was never anything more than elitist paranoia.