As of quite recently, more than a third of Slave Lake residents had not responded to the federal census. That’s the news that the Town of Slave Lake’s Director of Finance Julia Seppola shared with Town council at council’s Aug. 15 meeting.
It didn’t go over very well.
“With that sort of lack of completion, our numbers could go down!” said Councillor Rob Irwin. Seppola said she heard the information from a Statistics Canada worker, who had visited the Town office looking for help in locating people. The enumerators were apparently going door-to-door trying to fill in the gaps in information submitted by other means.
Seppola also said she had been told that each person is worth $10,000 in government grants. Council immediately started talking about an advertising blitz to get the message out.
But the next morning, a Statistics Canada spokesperson told The Leader that the enumeration of Slave Lake was finished.
“The Town of Slave Lake is complete,” said Sarah Pearson, Communications Officers for the Western Region of StatsCan. Of course she couldn’t say what the new official population figure for Slave Lake would be.
“Spring ’07 for the first population and dwelling counts,” she said.
Asked about the $10,000 per capita figure, Pearson said that in terms of transfer payments from Ottawa to Alberta, each Albertan is worth $2,500 per year for the next five years.
Per capita grants to municipalities are a different story. The Town calculates a rough figure of $1,000 per person in the form of federal and provincial grants. If the census misses 100 people, that’s $100,000 the Town doesn’t get for such things as infrastructure and policing. And if they don’t get the money from there, guess where it has to come from?
“It comes down to property taxes,” says Mayor Karina Pillay-Kinnee. “People need to make that connection.”
But it’s apparently too late this time around. The last census (2001) turned up a population of 6,600 in Slave Lake. Many felt it was a bogus count, given that it represented an increase of only 47 people in the five years between 1996 and 2001.
Hence council’s nervousness about the 2006 edition.
This year’s was the first census that provided residents the opportunity to complete census forms online. Pearson says about 20 per cent of Albertans submitted their information that way. Others did it over the phone or mailed it in. The rest were either contacted by enumerators going door to door, or not at all.
Some estimates put the Town’s population at 8,000 or even higher. But the one that really counts is based on the federal census.

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