BANFF – The Town of Banff is looking to postpone this year’s municipal census until 2023.
Administration is recommending the census be postponed and council is expected to make a decision at its next meeting on Monday, April 11.
The last two municipal censuses have involved both online responses as well as in-person enumeration, but officials with the Town of Banff say the municipality’s contracted census software provider will not be providing any census software in 2022.
“There are very few alternate software providers, as municipal censuses are not common in other jurisdictions,” said Darren Enns, the director of planning and development for the Town of Banff.
Banff typically conducts a municipal population count the year after a federal census. The results of the 2021 federal census, which were released last month, reported the Town of Banff’s residential population at 8,305.
Municipal census figures were traditionally used by the province of Alberta to calculate per capita grant amounts, however, that approach has changed to provincially developed population estimates by the Office of Statistics and Information at the Alberta Treasury Board and Finance.
Enns said the federal census will provide the baseline for estimating annual populations in the future.
“In response, many municipalities have adjusted their approach to municipal census,” he said.
“Of 19 municipalities who responded to Town of Banff inquiries, nine indicated they were never again going to conduct a municipal census, six were waiting until 2023 and four were moving forward with a census in 2022.”
There is an option to conduct a manual, analog census using personal enumeration and public records this year.
“This is not recommended given the intense time commitment required, the manual analysis of data and the anticipated limited labour pool to draw from in the summer of 2022,” said Enns.
The budget for the municipal census was $35,400. The spend will be transferred to next year if council decides to postpone the census based on administration’s advice.
