Digitizing Early Postwar Canadian Census Tract Maps: Sources, Methods and Challenges

ABSTRACT

At present, Canadian census tract boundaries are available in digital form for 1951 and at 5-year intervals for the 1976–2021 period; the 1956–66 census boundary files have not been digitized and associated data are not readily available for the pre-1971 period. This inhibits the mapping and analysis of neighbourhood change for a period of rapid urban and social transformation. To fill this gap, we digitized 1956–66 census tract boundaries from paper maps for all cities for which such data were disseminated. We adjusted 2006 boundaries to match georeferenced historical maps in concert with ancillary data, including topographic and cadastral maps. All decisions are documented in the files. Finally, printed profile tables for 1951 and 1956 were digitized for joining the boundary files. Researchers may use these datasets to explore, analyse and map geospatial trends in the Canadian population at the neighbourhood scale back to 1951.

KEYWORDS:

• Census of Canada
• census tract
• digitization
• neighbourhood change
• historical geography

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See also Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1958); Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1962); Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1967).

2 For example, we understand that Libraries and Archives Canada possesses in its collection paper sheet maps of enumeration areas, the administrative geographic units used to facilitate collection of census data from households, and typescript tables indicating the census tract within which each enumeration area lies. Provided that these enumeration area sheet maps are complete, accurate, and can be scanned, they could in principle be georeferenced and used to identify the boundaries between census tract polygons where they are ambiguous in the published reference maps used in our project.

3 We do not describe the procedures used to create these data tables here. For more information, visit https://observatory.uwo.ca/unicen/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by internal university funding from Faculty of Social Science at Western University.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Macdonald Hewitt

Christopher Macdonald Hewitt is a Mitacs postdoctoral fellow with Esri Canada and the University of Western Ontario. His project is to create using Esri tools a fast and flexible platform through which users can analyse, visualize and download selected historical census data back to 1851.

Zack Taylor

Zack Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Western University in London, Canada. Between 2018 and 2021, he was director of Western's Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance in the Network on Economic and Social Trends. His research focuses on urban political economy, Canadian and comparative politics and policymaking, and political geography. He is a fellow of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a non-practicing accredited urban planner. He has a special interest in the Canadian Census, leading the Unified Infrastructure for Canadian Census Research and serving as a co-investigator of the Canadian Census Discovery Partnership project.