By Stefanie Kranjec
Canada is joining a small club of countries that is bringing the census into the Internet age, and aims to have 20 percent of respondents fill out their surveys online this year.
Paper census forms that try to track the habits, backgrounds and movements of Canada's 32 million people will arrive at households in the mail this week, and with them will be a special Internet access code.
"What (the code) allows you to do is go to the Web site where the system checks if your computer has the necessary security requirements," Canadian census director general Anil Arora said on Monday.
"It's possible that with some older browsers, a machine may not have the level of security that we would like," he said. "The level of priority we place on confidentiality, on security, is pretty high, pretty impressive."
The Internet initiative puts Canada in a small group of countries that have attempted to conduct a national census online. Among them, New Zealand and Switzerland have been successful, with about 30 percent of the Swiss population opting to fill in the questionnaire on the Internet.
Statistics Canada, the government agency that conducts a national census every five years, says that its census Web site is "10 times more secure than the average Internet banking site."
Anne-Marie Hayden, spokeswoman for the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, said the system meets her agency's standards. "We didn't come across anything that would pose a threat to privacy."
The online census will be backed up by three call centers, as well as about 27,000 enumerators, who scour the country to make sure as many people as possible respond.
Canada's Statistics Act prohibits anyone from refusing to take part in the census. Those who do not comply may be charged C$500 ($450) or face up to three months in jail.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.
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