Now almost every day, Kheraj receives an updated list of households around St. John’s, Rothesay Town and St. Martins Village that have been marked as not completed by the computer system due to the computer system.

The same system monitors more than 15 million houses across the country, and multiple mail reminders have been generated.

“But I didn’t come to class,” Kheraj said. “I’m just here to help them complete it.”

Watch / Why this census taker likes to break ice:

She said that in most cases, people were positive and pointed out that a great icebreaker was talking about what she saw in the fields and front yard.

“I like flowers. I like vegetables. I always praise people’s gardens,” she said.

Kheraj, 70, who has retired for nearly ten years, said she is looking for something that might feel like an adventure because her passion for cruise travel has been put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While collecting data, she also collected newspaper clippings of climbing Phlox and promised to exchange pink and gold irises with a resident later this year.

“I think this is very important to us because we represent the government to make them realize that we are just one of them,” she said. “We just have work to do. We are not trying to get them.”

“The census is legally mandatory”

Kheraj said that she knocked on as many as 300 doors, and on the one hand, she could calculate the number of people who refused to participate, even though they might be fined up to $500.

“Yes, the census is legally mandatory,” said Jeff Bowlby, Director General of Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census. “That’s because of its extraordinary importance.”

Nevertheless, there are still laggards.

Bowlby said that New Brunswick’s response to this year’s census was slower than the rest of the country.

“We are really trying to avoid people using paper questionnaires,” he said. “They are expensive for taxpayers. They are bad for the environment, and they slow down the speed at which we process data.”

Bowlby said that encouraging people to submit the census online “may have a disproportionate impact on New Brunswick, which has a relatively large rural population. This means that our door-to-door activities in New Brunswick are more Hope or plan more.”

The census helps determine where the money goes

New Brunswick Finance Minister Ernie Steeves said that census data is a key component of calculating federal transfer payments to provinces and territories.

He said at a press conference on May 10: “Every unanswered investigation will lead to a reduction in our province’s funds.”

Michael Haan, a demographer and director of the Statistics Canada Research Data Center at the University of Western London, Ontario, said the data is also used to plan critical infrastructure.

“Where are we going to put schools, where are we going to put hospitals, highways and train systems? All this comes from census population forecasts, which determine future growth points,” he said.

“And our aborigines, where are they? How are they doing? Where do they live? Did they move? All of this comes from the census.”

Haan said: “It is almost hard to imagine that a Canadian policy or legislation does not obtain information from past or current censuses, at least in part.”