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Symposium 97 was the fourtheenth international symposium on methodological issues sponsored by Statistics Canada. Each year, the symposium focuses on a particular theme. This year's theme was on new directions in surveys and censuses. The 1997 symposium attracted over 500 people who met over three days at the Palais des Congrès in Hull to listen to over 70 presentations by experts from various statistical and other government agencies, universities and the private sector. Aside from translation and Aormatting, the papers submitted by the presenters have been reproduced in these proceedings.

This report is intended to take stock of the research and development at Statistics Canada to date and presents revised estimates of the value of unpaid work (VUW) for the period from 1961 to 1992. It addresses some key questions. Why measure and value unpaid work and why exclude it from GDP? What counts as unpaid work, whose work counts, and how is it valued? What is the value of unpaid work in Canada and how has it changed over time? What are its relationships with other socio-economic factors? The remainder of the introduction addresses these issues in general terms.

This paper presents a critical survey of the labour/leisure choice frame-work and its usefulness in analyzing behavioural response to tax and social policy legislation. Micro simulation, once it moves beyond simplistic incidence analysis, must consider the behavioural response of individuals to changes which legislation induces in the constraints which individuals face. Due to its analytical simplicity, the labour/leisure framework offers a useful "first step" in modeling such behavioural response. The paper surveys the existing literature on labour supply elasticities and suggests some working assumptions. It concludes, however, on a note of caution - namely that the single period labour/leisure choice model may be a very poor guide to the behaviour of the "working poor" when confronted with changes tax and social policy legislation -- more elaborate models of lifecycle behaviour are clearly required.

This volume, a companion to Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition, is a collection of papers on data collection issues for welfare and low-income populations. The papers on survey issues cover methods for designing surveys taking into account nonresponse in advance, obtaining high response rates in telephone surveys, obtaining high response rates in in-person surveys, the effects of incentive payments, methods for adjusting for missing data in surveys of low-income populations, and measurement error issues in surveys, with a special focus on recall error. The papers on administrative data cover the issues of matching and cleaning, access and confidentiality, problems in measuring employment and income, and the availability of data on children. The papers on welfare leavers and welfare dynamics cover a comparison of existing welfare leaver studies, data from the state of Wisconsin on welfare leavers, and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth used to construct measures of heterogeneity in the welfare population based on the recipient's own welfare experience. A final paper discusses qualitative data.

The catalogue provides a complete record of all catalogued publications of Statistics Canada and of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. It documents the publishing program of the Bureau from its formation in 1918 to December 31, 1980. The publication also includes references to materials dating from the 1851 Census of Canada and a number of publications of other federal departments issued prior to 1918.

This report presents the results of six population projection scenarios by age group and sex up to 2031 for the provinces and territories and up to 2056 for Canada. Using the July 1, 2005 population estimate as the starting point, these projections are based on assumptions that take into account the most recent trends relating to components of population growth, particularly fertility, mortality, immigration, emigration and interprovincial migration.