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Community leaders say they plan to use a small window of opportunity to lobby Statistics Canada for changes to the 2021 long-form questionnaire, lest the results get replicated in five years time, further skewing the size of the community. If their efforts are unsuccessful, they would have to find a way to conduct their own community count.

“We are concerned and the issues are definitely on our radar,” said Linda Kislowicz, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of Canada.

On the census question of ethnicity, this seems to be where the 2016 survey falls short

“We have every intention of working both with the civil servants and the politicians involved in this to see if we can lobby them to change the way they’re doing this.”

But the figures also reflect an age-old question for the community about how to define Jewish. There are Jews who see the identity as religious and ethnic; others only see it as a cultural affiliation.

Similar questions may face groups that have a cultural and religious identities, said Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, but not in the same way as it does in the case of the Jewish community.

Jewish groups use census data on language, religion — which is asked once every 10 years — country of origin and ethnicity to create as accurate a picture as possible about Jews in Canada. A six-point definition was established to counteract a long-term decline in the number of Jews who identify themselves on the census as ethnically Jewish, a category that on its own may miss swaths of Canada’s Jews.