Scrapping the mandatory long-form census will endanger Canadians’ public health, put the country’s most vulnerable citizens at risk and hamper scientists’ involvement in the international research community, health experts say.

Fifteen top health officials and researchers spoke out Thursday against abandoning the mandatory long-form census, warning the federal government of the negative public health implications at coordinated news conferences in Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Edmonton and Winnipeg.

Toronto Medical Officer of Health Dr. David McKeown said the health of Torontonians will suffer without access to crucial long-form census data. The city’s most vulnerable citizens, including immigrants, the poor and those in marginalized communities, are at greatest risk, he said.

“Delivering appropriate and effective local health services requires accurate local information,” McKeown said at the Toronto news conference. “The long-form census is an essential source of information about local populations which we in Toronto Public Health use day to day.”

Public health experts say data collected by the long-form census on immigration, ethnicity, language, education, income, employment and transportation are vital to their work. These factors, collectively known as social determinants of health, can have a positive or negative impact on an individual’s overall health.

In Toronto, long-form census data is used to create education, prevention and treatment programs for people with — or at risk for — type 2 diabetes.

“We know that it is not experienced in the same way by different communities,” McKeown said. “For example, aboriginal communities and people of South Asian descent have higher rates of diabetes. Our ability to direct our programs to those communities depends on knowing who and where they are and that information comes from the long-form census.”

A primary concern with eliminating the mandatory long-form census is that those who respond to voluntary surveys are most likely to be middle income and white, which results in an inaccurate representation of the population.

McKeown said those less likely to respond, including low income earners, aboriginals and new comers, are “also those who are at greatest risk for poor health and about whom we need good information most.”

Cherie Miller, director of community health at the Regent Park Community Health Centre, said their clients, many of whom live in extreme poverty, will not — and may not know how to — fill out a voluntary survey. The mandatory long-form census, she said, “actually gives our folks the chance to have a voice.”

Community health centres use long-form census data to plan programs, figure out if they are reaching everyone who needs help and that information is provided in a meaningful way, Miller said.

Thursday’s news conferences, organized by the “Save the Census Campaign,” which is spearheaded by social planning bodies, brought together medical officers of health, nurses, epidemiologists and community health experts. Many participants, and their representative organizations, have written letters to the federal government on the issue but felt it was time to publicly speak out before MPs return to Ottawa in September.

Ottawa has stuck by its decision to eliminate the mandatory long-form census in favour of a voluntary National Household Survey, despite complaints from city officials, educators, provincial governments, economists and a wide range of agencies.

“The loss of the long-form census is equal to the government actually shutting off Canada’s navigation system,” Peggy Taillon, president and CEO of the Canadian Council on Social Development, said in an interview.

“There is no other data like that in Canada, that is centralized, that is as comprehensive, and reliable,” said Taillon, who organized the Ottawa event, held at a community health centre.

One important way the data are used, she said, is to help communities determine whether and where to build a hospital, and whether it would be better to include an obstetrics ward, a geriatrics ward, or both.

Taillon noted that an important feature of the Ottawa area is an urban centre surrounded by rural communities. Long-form census data would have gone into the decision to build mainly smaller primary health care clinics in the country with links to bigger hospitals in the city, she said.

Patti Groome, professor of epidemiology at Queen’s University and Canada Research Chair in cancer care evaluation, said the voluntary National Household Survey will not be accepted by the international research community as providing valid information.

“Traditionally, census information has been shared between countries to understand differences in socioeconomic gradients . . . and how they relate to health,” she told the Star. “If I was someone from another country doing a project looking across countries at those kinds of relationships I might now exclude Canadian data because I don’t trust it anymore. So now we are not part of the picture anymore.”

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Without long-form census data, Canada will also be unable to compare itself to health benchmarks of other countries, she said.

Groome, who did not participate in the news conferences, expressed her views in a July 18 letter addressed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Industry Minister Tony Clement and Munir Sheikh, who has since resigned his post as chief statistician at Statistics Canada. Groome made the letter public Thursday.

With files from Joanna Smith in Ottawa

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