As you probably heard in the news this morning, the 2011 Census data is available. Well, sort of...

As with previous censuses, the data is released over a few years. Today was just the first release of 2011 data, and it only covers general population numbers. The age/sex breakdown will come in May, marital status in September, language in October, etc.

If you can't wait and must have detailed info now, you have a few options:

• FP Markets: Canadian Demographics is a print source (AKA "book") that provides current-year estimates of many key demographics as well as PSYTE consumer segmentation -- all at the city level for Canada. See my earlier blog post about it.

• Some of our databases, e.g., Passport GMID, provide national-level estimates (and even forecasts in some cases) for key demographic and economic measures.

• It's often possible to find current population estimates for provinces, health regions, school districts, etc., including ones that cover age, sex, income, and other measures. See this BC STATS page, for example.

Note that Statistics Canada has decided to make far more of their data freely available - including both CANSIM and much of the census data. They seem to also be trying to make their data easier to understand. Check out their new Visual Census resource, for example. I look forward to seeing how they will chart the many other census topics to be released in coming months.

We also have a number of census data resources here at SFU, ranging from the Census Analyser to PCensus. None of them have 2011 data yet, but they're great if you need to work with older data.

Let me know if you have any questions!

-- Mark (mbodnar@sfu.ca)