The Social Planning Network of Ontario (SPNO) issued a statement on the National Household Survey in January. The statement is copied below.

Click here to check out the statement on the SPNO website

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The voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) has produced lower quality data than the mandatory long-form Census it has replaced. The Social Planning Network of Ontario only uses NHS data when higher quality data is not available.

The CCSD’s President and CEO, Peggy Taillon, today announced the addition of a new program to its suite, Community Analytics. This initiative complements and builds on our flagship program, the Community Data Program (CDP). 

Several users reported issues unzipping 2011 Taxfiler and 2011 NHS tables from the communitydata.ca catalogue over the past three weeks. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. We've isolated the problem, and the current files appear to be unzipping properly.

The affected files include:

Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph, the Lead organisation for the WDG Consortium, recently published bulletins based on the 2011 Census and NHS. Check them out below.

In its Community Dispatch (Vol. 19, No. 1) Community Development Halton maps global non-response rates by census tract for all of Halton.

View Community Dispatch Vol. 19, No. 1

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a voluntary international initiative that aims to secure commitments from governments to their citizenry to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. Open data is an important component of open government.

Read the 2012-2013 progress report for Canada

Now that we're starting to get data from the NHS (well, profile tables at least) we've decided to release a Product Profile that brings together existing information on the NHS and, where relevant, the Census.

There's plenty of new data in the catalogue, including 2011 Taxfiler data, and our first semi-custom Census topic-based tabulations. No, unfortunately that doesn't mean custom geographies (yet). Just Census tables at smaller geographies than are available on the Statistics Canada website.

We've begun organising a webinar on NHS and Taxfiler data with a focus on income. It will be an opportunity to discuss emerging good practice with respect to measuring poverty, assessing NHS quality, working with small-area income data, and using Taxfiler tables. Date: Thursday, April 10, 2014. Stay tuned for updates.

In Part 2 of this Product Profile, we explain some of the issues associated with the voluntary nature of the NHS, and how to address them. We also show what some consortia have begun to do about NHS data quality, especially with respect to mapping the global non-response rate. (More about global non-response rates in a moment.)

In addition, you may want to check out some other resources on the NHS: