Statistics Canada said Monday that 98.4 per cent of households responded to the 2026 census of population, one of the highest participation rates the agency has ever recorded. More than 88 per cent of respondents filled out the questionnaire online, and 91.2 per cent completed it on their own without a follow-up visit from an enumerator, both records.
The agency said it has begun compiling the results and will publish them in seven batches through 2027, starting with population and dwelling counts on Feb. 10.
What a 98.4 per cent response rate does not tell Canadians is how many people the census missed. Those are two different measurements, and Statistics Canada does not publish the second one until years after the first.
A response rate measures the share of dwellings on the agency’s address list that returned a usable questionnaire. Coverage measures something harder: whether people were never on that list at all, lived at an address the census could not reach, or lived in a community where enumeration was blocked or abandoned partway through. A household that was never contacted cannot decline to respond, so it does not lower the response rate. It simply does not appear.
The 2021 census shows how wide that gap can get. According to Statistics Canada’s Indigenous Peoples Technical Report, 63 reserves and settlements were classified as incompletely enumerated in 2021, meaning census data for them do not exist and were excluded from every tabulation the agency published. The agency’s own model estimates roughly 58,480 people lived in those communities.
In 2016, by comparison, 14 reserves were incompletely enumerated, covering an estimated 27,790 people. The number of communities left out of the count more than quadrupled in a single cycle, and the estimated population missing roughly doubled. Statistics Canada attributed much of that to COVID-19 health restrictions and to evacuations driven by wildfires, both of which cut off field collection.
The communities that did participate were also undercounted. Statistics Canada’s coverage studies put net undercoverage on participating reserves and settlements at 5.85 per cent nationally in 2021, or about 22,857 people. The provincial figures run higher in places: 11.85 per cent in New Brunswick, 10.66 per cent in British Columbia and 8.58 per cent in Manitoba. Those estimates come from the Census Undercoverage Study and Census Overcoverage Study, which the agency ran after collection closed and released in September 2023, more than two years after census day.
This matters beyond statistical housekeeping. Census counts feed the formulas that set federal transfer payments to provinces, drive the redrawing of federal electoral boundaries, and underpin funding allocations for housing, health and education programs. The 2021 cycle was also the one that made disaggregated data on Indigenous and racialized populations a working tool of Canadian policy, used by governments to size programs aimed at communities they had historically measured poorly. A count that misses tens of thousands of people on reserve produces smaller numbers, and smaller numbers produce smaller allocations.
Statistics Canada made a visible effort to close that gap this time. Collection began early, in February, in northern and remote communities rather than in May with the rest of the country, and the agency translated census questions into 15 Indigenous languages. Indigenous organizations ran their own participation campaigns through the spring.
Whether that worked is the question Monday’s announcement did not answer. Statistics Canada has not said how many reserves and settlements were incompletely enumerated in 2026, and it has not published a coverage estimate. On the 2021 timeline, those figures would not arrive until sometime in 2028, well after the seven data releases have already been used to write policy, argue budgets and redraw maps.
For now, the number in circulation is 98.4 per cent. It is a real achievement in collection, and it is not the same thing as an accurate count.
via The Canadian Press / CP24. Coverage and enumeration figures from Statistics Canada’s Indigenous Peoples Technical Report, Census of Population, 2021 (Catalogue no. 98-307-X).
