The City of Thompson plans to ask Statistics Canada for a formal review of the 2021 census population numbers, believing that the local population did not decline by almost five per cent since 2016.
The official census results showed that Thompson had lost about 6-00 residents in the last five years and had a population of just over 13,000.
Census numbers are used to calculate per capita grants from the provincial and federal governments, which means that an undercount can significantly affect the municipal budget.
“There’s a number of anecdotal data or information that would suggest the population has not shrunk as much as this census suggests,” said city manager Anthony McInnis at the March 7 committee of the whole meeting.
Deputy mayor Brian Lundmark noted that undercounts in the north are not uncommon.
“Historically, in Northern Manitoba, our census is always off, even in the smaller communities that I used to work with,” he said.
The 2011 census, which said Thompson’s population had dropped 4.6 per vent, was reviewed at the request of the city and the revised population estimate rose to only 2.4 per cent less than what it had been in 2006. Nineteen of 30 reviews requested by Northern Association of Community Councils communities following that census saw population counts rise as well.
The Manitoba Bureau of Statistics, which believed the 2011 census missed 16,000 or more of the province’s residents, told the Thompson Citizen in 2016 that each one of those missed people cost the province roughly $45,000 in lost funding over five years.
When the 2011 census population count, which was down about 600 people from 2006 before review, got revised upwards, it increased grant funding for the city by about $50,000 per year.
Although the city will likely pay a consultant to collect data in an effort to get the 2021 population increased, it should cost much less than the funding difference would bring in annually if Statistics Canada’s review concludes that the number of residents should be higher.
Mayor Colleen Smook says she thinks the chances of better population numbers upon review are good.
“The ones that were doing the census kept reaching out to me [last year] to reach out to the public,” she said March 7. “They didn’t feel that they were getting accurate numbers.”
McInnis said evidence to support the review doesn’t have to be an actual person-by-person count of Thompson's residents.
“Looking at building permits, looking at occupancy levels, looking at garbage, water, wastewater, there’s all kinds of other ways that you can show how those numbers have remained the same, increased or decreased over time, to infer if a population is changing in that area,” he said.
Requests for review must be submitted by the end of 2022.
