The Population Projections Project (PPP) provides a reference with which to understand where communities are and where they are heading on current demographic trends. This non partisan demographic trends reference is an alternative to community member having to use projections or a single forecast mostly designed to support a current government's policies and directions.
The PPP is based on open data, as reliable as possible (censuses) and uses a straight forward method that produces high quality projection scenarios. Anyone can participate in sharing this valuable information. Most people can learn the basics in an hour. Local businesses can donate to cover the time it takes to create the charts seen under the Projections tab.
The Population Projections Project Programme meets the Prescribed Learning Outcomes expectations for improving students ability in interpreting statistical data, and to demonstrate effective research skills, including accessing and assessing information, collecting and evaluating data, required for many courses including Civic Studies 11, Social Studies 11, Sustainable Resources 11 and 12 Essentials of Mathematics 10 to 12.
The programme is also appropriate for university students, as well as for anyone interested in demographic trends (i.e. fertility, life expectancy, migration by age and sex.)
What can you do to provide a reference with which to understand where we are and where we are heading on current demogrphic trends? Create population projections for your areas of interest using the same methods and data source (click on the Instructions tab) and share the findings online. Participate in populating a wikipop! Use Canada's Census of Population and the method shown on the Instructions tab and share the projections online with your community members (census areas).
If your college or university has a community outreach program, and is willing to provide well defined population projection scenarios, you may be able to post your findings on the institutions server.
Either way, send us a link to your site (or the college or university's) or send the findings to us and we will post it credited to you.
See the video on how create a Table of Discovery This video shows how to find, gather, and store Census of Population counts for each census: 1996, 2001, 2006, and 2011. Use these steps to navigate the 2016 Census of Population.
Again, donations from the business community in your area can go to the students or citizens who have learned the Population Projections Project Programme and are willing to create the charts for their area(s) of interest
A Call to Educators
The Population Projections Project was built upon the efforts by people over hundreds of years to develop the informed society. 400 years ago in 1617, Sir Francis Bacon was laying down the foundations for a revolution in science because "all the tradition and succession of schools is still a succession of masters and scholars, not of inventors ... In what is now done in the matter of science there is only whirling about, and perpetual agitation, ending where it began." ( Preface to Magna Instauratio by Francis Bacon).
Bacon highlighted the value of tables of more or less - like the table put together using the censuses of population, counts aggregated from enumeration areas across the nation, tabulated, made available via the internet, downloadable to a personal computer, explorable using a number processor (excel in this case), interpreted, represented and shared world wide.
Never before has society had so much information available. Why then are people so misinformed about demographic trends? Why are school opened just as enrolment declines and why are schools closed just when enrolment goes up? How could experts not see the latest baby boom coming? Why are academics overstating the impact of the retiring baby boomers? Is Canada "firmly in the grip of a westward shift in population power" even though the proportion of population in western Canada rose by less than one percent (0.6%)? The Minister of Education who said "it would be difficult to know demographically what will change in the riding in the immediate years ahead" is correct especially when we do not look. (See the Article Will demographic shifts catch experts by surprise again?).
Bacon pointed out many of the problems with current learning that need be addressed by the revolution including "the third vice or disease of learning, which concerneth deceit or untruth, it is of all the rest the foulest; as that which doth destroy the essential form of knowledge, which is nothing but a representation of truth (Advancement of Learning) available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5500/5500-h/5500-h.htm