Confidentiality

Statistics Canada takes your confidentiality very seriously. Under the Statistics Act, all information provided to Statistics Canada will be kept confidential and used only for statistical purposes. We do not release any information that could identify individuals, households, businesses, or organizations. All outputs are screened to ensure that they do not reveal the identity of individual respondents. For example, names of respondents will not be in the analysis file that will be created, and data in tables and graphs will be in aggregate form (e.g., provincial levels).

Under the Statistics Act, employees must take an oath of secrecy and only those employees who need to work with questionnaires or files have access to them.

• Confidentiality is an essential principle that establishes and sustains the agency’s credibility and public trust in Statistics Canada.
• Confidential information cannot be accessed by anyone outside the agency.
• Statistics Canada does not share information with any other government department including: the Canada Revenue Agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
• Confidential data cannot be obtained under the provisions of the Access to Information Act.

Statistics Canada also ensures the privacy of its respondents. Under the Privacy Act, respondents have the right to expect that their personal information will be kept confidential.

Protection of confidential information is extremely important to Statistics Canada. Before individuals send their electronic questionnaire responses over the Internet, certain security conditions must be met. The browser used must have the current minimum secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption capability.

Before your electronic questionnaire responses can be saved or transmitted to our secure servers, our computers will check the level of encryption in your computer’s browser. Given the nature and importance of the information provided, we use the highest possible level of security.