TORONTO, February 8, 2002 -- A national project to build census-based profiles revealing the untold history of ordinary Canadians has won $5.2 million in start-up funding from the federal government’s Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). It is one of the largest social science projects ever funded by CFI.
York University will be the site of a joint centre with the University of Toronto for the five-year project called the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI). The project will result in a series of national databases from census records covering a century of Canadian life. Scholars will focus on the period between1911 and 1951 to create "public use samples" that anonymously profile the population at ten-year intervals, making this information accessible to researchers and to the public for the first time, while strictly maintaining the confidentiality of individual records. The new evidence bridges a series of currently available sample data from the censuses of 1871, 1881 and 1901 and the public-use samples released by Statistics Canada since the 1971 census.
"We will be rewriting the census reports," says Gordon Darroch, professor of sociology and principal investigator at York for the project. "The social history of Canada in the lives of ordinary Canadians lies hidden in that data. I expect our profiles will generate a lot of new research."
Darroch notes that history in all societies is made by the anonymous as well as the famous and infamous. "We will be recovering the social history of all Canadians, not just those who leave papers and records behind." Once the data are available, scholars are expected to examine more closely such questions as the urbanization of the country, immigration flows, changes in the education of children, in family composition, in women’s employment, in class and community structures, and other profound social transformations that underlie the Canadian experience.
The research network consists of seven universities: Memorial University in Newfoundland working on the Atlantic provinces; Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises at Université Laval and Université Québéc Trois Rivières, conducting research on Quebec; York University and the University of Toronto covering Ontario; University of Victoria covering the West, Pacific and Northern Canada; University of Ottawa as the coordinating institution with Statistics Canada as a partner. The samples will be archived at York and in several other locations across the country, and available through a project website.
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For further information, please contact:
| Prof. Gordon Darroch | Susan Bigelow |
| Dept. of Sociology | Media Relations |
| York University | York University |
| 416-736-2100, ext. 77994 | 416-736-2100, ext. 22091 |
| darroch@yorku.ca | sbigelow@yorku.ca |
YU/019/02
