OTTAWA — Statistics Canada's request to view your confidential tax information proved overwhelmingly popular with respondents to the 2006 census, with 8 in 10 agreeing to hand over their tax records.
Whether it was an issue of trust or a desire to not manually plug in their income, 82.4 per cent of the population aged 15 and over agreed to the method.
Direct access to those records went a long way to improving the quality of the income and earnings data released Thursday, Statistics Canada said.
That precision meant less rounding of numbers, among other things.
The census showed the earnings of the average Canadian has stagnated over the last 25 years.
In 2005, a person with a full-time job earned a median pre-tax salary of $41,348 — only about a buck-a-week more than what the average worker took home in 1980, when adjusted for inflation.
To crunch the majority of that data, the Canada Revenue Agency provided a file to Statistics Canada that was then searched for the records of respondents who agreed to retrieve data from tax records.
Of the people who consented to that method, the agency found records to match 89.1 per cent of them.
At no time were social insurance numbers used to match records, nor were they attached to the census data, the federal agency said.
Residents of Nunavut were the least inclined to share their tax records, with only 10.8 per cent saying yes.
Newfoundland and Labrador residents, for the most part, didn’t object. The province had a permission granting rate of 85.9 per cent — the highest in the country.
The Canadian Press
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