Page 96 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS407 Étienne Saint-Pierre
activities. For a better alignment with the concept used in the economic
statistics program and the BR, the concept to define the farm population used
in the Census of Agriculture is being reviewed. The second component of the
frame coming from the self-identification in the Census of Population has
been dropped. The vast majority of operations identified via the Census of
Population were already covered in the Business Register (86%). Those missing
were mostly operations having no real economic (0.4% of the value of sales)
or policy impact (ex. hobby farms). The identification, collection and
processing of these units is very expensive with very little impact on the
various aggregates. With the Census of Agriculture 2021, it is proposed to
define a farm or agricultural holding as a unit producing agricultural products
and reporting agricultural revenues or expenses for tax purposes. Signals from
the tax agency are used to keep the BR up-to-date. The convergence of the
definitions will basically mean that the farm population used in the Agriculture
Statistics Program will be kept up-to-date in real-time and will not see a
degradation between Censuses.

ii) Harmonized concepts and content
With the migration to IBSP, all the Census of agriculture variables are
organized according the IBSP Variable Naming Framework. In the IBSP, the
naming framework is applied in a consistent, coherent, and logical manner
that can be replicated for all statistical programs. All variables are assigned a
cell number logically generated from variable names and contain semantic
meaning. With the integration of a survey into the IBSP, all the variables are
scrutinized, harmonized, decomposed. The Figures 1 shows an example of the
naming framework.

Figure 1 – Example of the naming framework in the IBSP

Source: Statistics Canada, Quick Click Reference Guide for the IBSP Metadata

As an example, the question of revenues coming from sales of fresh apple
at the fruit market is decomposed and harmonized with the IBSP Naming

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