Canada at a Glance 2022 | Coup d'œil sur le Canada 2022

November 23, 2022 10:34 AM

Prepared by Statistics Canada, Canada at a Glance presents current statistics on Canadian society. Subjects covered in Canada at a Glance include population, education, health, and others to provide a statistical portrait of Canada.

The report (PDF) includes graphs and tables to summarise the information and includes the following highlights from census data of well as the national household survey data and other sources:

- in 2021 people who are immigrants account for just over 23% of the population

- over 24% of women and 20% of men are people with disability

- LGBTQ2+ people are almost 30% of those 15-24 years old and just over 7% of those 65 years and older

- in 2020, 84.4% of Canadians owned a smartphone

- housing prices rose 20.6% from 2018 to 2021

- 33% of people experienced mental health difficulties during the pandemic

- in 2019 the average amount of energy consumed per household was 90.5 gigajoules, and per capita household greenhouse gas emissions was 3.8 tonnes


Definitions for terms and further explanation of data can be found in the notes, references, and QR codes in each section of the report.

posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia (23 comments total)

- LGBTQ2+ people are almost 30% of those 15-24 years old and just over 7% of those 65 years and older

The wording confused me so I looked at the chart and out of all LGBTQ2+ people, 30% are in the age group 15-24 and 7% are 65+. Not that 30% of all Canadians aged 15-24 are LGBTQ2+ people.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:11 AM on November 23, 2022 [23 favorites]

Wow, violent crime has really gone up!
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:44 AM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks, any portmanteau in a storm, your wording is clearer.
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 12:06 PM on November 23, 2022

For those not interested enough to go looking at the data.... the total population LGB+ rate is 4%:
An estimated 1 million people in Canada are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or of another sexual orientation than heterosexual - representing 4% of the Canadian population aged 15 years and older.
For comparison, wikipedia's top line # is ~7% for the US from a Gallop poll (as the US Census didn't ask)
Kudos to the Statscan web / communications team! The ease of use and friendliness of these pages is off the charts compared to the US census pages. (granted, the US team is operating in a slightly more hostile environment)
posted by cfraenkel at 1:37 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

a long time ago I conducted interviews for StatsCan and you haven't lived till you have spoken on the phone with a farmer who hated StatsCan 20 years ago and only hates StatsCan even more today, and that farmer tells you about the gold plated pen you're handling in your big office in Toronto (open office in Western Canadian city, but whatevs) and then says "If you died, no-one would care." It was the quiet hatred in that voice, it was just a weird moment.
posted by elkevelvet at 1:46 PM on November 23, 2022 [20 favorites]

I would like to have seen the educational attainment and income information for lgbtq2+ broken down by age group, does anyone know if that table exists somewhere? For, say, income, the table shows lgbtq2+ individuals being over-represented in lower income brackets, but then a higher percentage of lgbtqq+ people are younger and so that's not unexpected? I certainly wasn't making bank when I was 15-24. The skew in age makes a lot of the rest hard to interpret.
posted by selenized at 1:47 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Most wtf?!? stat so far:
Experienced at least one cyber security incident: 57.9%
Received fraudulent emails or unsolicited spam: 49.3%

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/12-581-x/2022001/sec11-eng.htm

How is that spam number not 100%??? I guess that points to the challenges of surveys, you're relying on what people report, not on anything resembling reality.
posted by cfraenkel at 1:50 PM on November 23, 2022 [6 favorites]

elkevelvet: a long time ago I conducted interviews for StatsCan and you haven't lived till you have spoken on the phone with a farmer who hated StatsCan 20 years ago and only hates StatsCan even more today, and that farmer tells you about the gold plated pen you're handling in your big office in Toronto (open office in Western Canadian city, but whatevs) and then says "If you died, no-one would care." It was the quiet hatred in that voice, it was just a weird moment.

I also did interviews for StatsCan years ago [but in-person] and faced hostility from farmers.

...but my Dad was a mechanic who fixed tractors and somehow always managed to finagle lunch from them (or - sorry - dinner, since the end-of-day meal was supper), and I knew that all farmers listened to the Farm Report on 790 CFCW at lunch, and the Farm Report always featured numbers from StatsCan. I was able to improvise something about how it's only StatsCan who kept the playing field level for the average farmer, because if it wasn't for StatsCan only big companies like Cargill would have the data to survive in the market. I doubt it changed their anti-government stance forever, but a little friendliness-and-facts at least got them to grant me the point and fill out the form.

I remember the person from Ottawa who drove around with me one day saying how excited they were to be driving around on real dirt roads. I did not correct them.

The roads were gravel.
posted by clawsoon at 2:22 PM on November 23, 2022 [12 favorites]

I never know whether to say whether I went to university or college, since I went to a place that called itself a University College. Not a college of a university, mind you, but some kind of weird hybrid.
posted by clawsoon at 2:26 PM on November 23, 2022

How is that spam number not 100%???

In some regards, I consider Spam a good fidget - in a dull moment, check off junk emails and delete them. Thus no longer Spam.

Spam is preferably edible, maybe diced into Mac and Cheese :)
posted by JoeXIII007 at 2:50 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

The CCHS/Safety Survey data (which includes the stats on sexual orientation) is rather hard to access outside of an institution. But we can do some math:

• In 2018, the CCHS and the Safety Survey found around 4% of Canadians over 15 are LGBT, and
• If 30% of LGBT Canadians are under 24, that's about 4% x 30% = 1.2% who are both LGBT and under 24
• Similarly, if 14% of non-LGBT Canadians are under 24, that's 96% x 14% = 13.4% who are both non-LGBT and under 24
• We have 1.2% / (1.2% + 13.4%) = ~8% of Canadians under 24 who are LGBT.

Similar math yields a full table:

15 - 24: 8.1%
25 - 34: 6.8%
35 - 44: 3.7%
45 - 54: 2.6%
55 - 64: 2.2%
65+    : 1.5%

Obviously this is very rough, we'd need a number more precise than just "4%" to get better.
posted by vasi at 5:36 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

The "learn more" links go to the general topic landing pages for a subject, so when I wanted to learn more about, "Reporting varied widely depending on the type of crime, from about half of all motor vehicle thefts, break and enters, and robberies, to 6% of sexual assaults", I ended up having to Google that statement to find anything. One thing I would've liked would be if they would've linked to the publications that each statement was based on.
posted by clawsoon at 6:10 PM on November 23, 2022

Yeah, Juristat is the magic word for more granular reporting on crime numbers, and it was a bit surprising there wasn't an obvious link to it.

that farmer tells you about the gold plated pen you're handling in your big office in Toronto (open office in Western Canadian city, but whatevs)

Not to mention the lavish, boozy lunches federal public servants at any level can totally expense.

*rolls eyes*

I'm going to gather this dude has never seen the inside of a federal government office, and the way in which they make beige seem like a psychedelic colour scheme.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:47 PM on November 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

The detailed info often isn't available to the public because of privacy concerns. StatsCan tends to take a ring-fence and then another ring-fence view of that just to be sure. Academics can get access to surveys and such as long as they've been cleared and have the right training to use the data.

I've got a bunch of friends who work for Stats in the economic portfolios who work directly with individual taxpayer data (people and companies). They're very, very careful and have lots of checks to clear to make sure they're not misusing data or breaching privacy by oversight. I've had occasion to work with commercially sensitive data too and it can be surprising tricky to do, in that sometimes identities can be inferred just because of low numbers in finely divided categories, for example.

It means sometimes it's hard to get the detail people sometimes want, but that's at least the thinking behind it. First, don't hurt the people who generously gave their info.
posted by bonehead at 8:32 PM on November 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of the odd differences between the US and Canada is how ridiculously tiny postal codes are vs zip codes. Ours happens to be just 4 houses.
So it's always surprised me in this privacy obsessed country how many companies and organizations ask you for the full postal code on surveys. Page after page of privacy this and protect your identity that and yet the data collected narrows you down to one of 8 individuals.
Makes one feel like all the privacy talk is just check-the-box posturing.
posted by cfraenkel at 8:58 PM on November 23, 2022 [6 favorites]

cfraenkel, that's precisely what I was trying to say. StatsCan does not make postal code-level info available for almost anything exactly because of that concern.
posted by bonehead at 6:16 AM on November 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

The ease of identifying where I live with postal codes is why I either use a fake one, or one that I memorized from an industrial area in my city, when companies demand a postal code for no good read.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:35 AM on November 24, 2022

I love using H0H 0H0 as a fake postal code when necessary.

It's Santa's postal code.
posted by juliebug at 7:39 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

You can also use just the first three digits of the postal code for slightly coarser analysis.
posted by The Outsider at 2:09 PM on November 27, 2022

Doesn't StatsCan have census tracts for exactly this?
posted by clawsoon at 2:38 PM on November 27, 2022

The roads were gravel.

Albertan here: we call them "dirt roads" even though they are, generally speaking, gravel roads.
posted by asnider at 1:12 PM on December 9, 2022

asnider: Albertan here: we call them "dirt roads" even though they are, generally speaking, gravel roads.

I grew up in Alberta, too. If I ever called them dirt roads I was corrected. (One is obviously taking on very different risks driving down a gravel road versus an actual dirt road, so it's important to distinguish.)

Now I'm curious to know which part of Alberta you grew up in so that we can have a regional "dirt v. gravel" showdown...
posted by clawsoon at 6:23 PM on December 9, 2022

I grew up in the Cold Lake area, so I guess North Eastern Alberta (though Cold Lake isn't quite half-way up the province, there is so much more "Northern" Alberta than people in Edmonton and points south seem to think) and I think dirt road and gravel road were pretty much interchangeable in the same way that, colloquially, cement and concrete are interchangeable: They are not, and some people will pedantically correct you, but also everyone knows what you mean when you say one and mean the other.

Perhaps one reason why the distinction sort of didn't matter may have been because the classification wasn't really that clean. Several of the gravel roads would, eventually, just degrade into a dirt road or drive straight into muskegg once they were far enough from civilization that I guess nobody cared anymore.

The back road I drove to go to Grand Centre was like this, by my house it was a gravel road, but about half way down it was solidly a dirt road and it stayed that way until you got to the next town then it turned back into gravel and joined the highway. This made it exciting to drive on in the spring because there was a low spot in the middle and if you slowed down or stopped you would sink into the mud in the middle of the road and that was it, you were not getting out. I have a friend who lives over by Westlock (so North West Alberta) and several of the range roads do the same thing: they start as gravel roads but once they are passed all of the houses they just fall apart and are dirt tracks, some are so far gone that they are just the two tire tracks with grass and weeds growing in between.
posted by selenized at 2:59 PM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]