Please count me in

Dear Mr. Harper,

My name is May, and I am 10 years old. I was born in 2011. At the time, my mother and father were going to English school for grown-ups, so they decided to give me an English name after the month I was born in.  They were very proud of me, and happy I could be born in their new home country of Canada.

I am writing you because my mother said you were Prime Minister when I was born, and she said that this is a very important job, and that you could do important things, even if you are not Prime Minister any more. I would like you to please tell your friends who are in charge to bring back the big counting thing my teacher says is called a census. We are doing a project at school about Canada, and my teacher said this would help us know more about Canada and all the people that live in it, so we could make sure they have all the things they need.

I really like school, but it is very crowded.  My class also has lots of kids from all over the world, who have moved to Canada with their families.  My friend Asha only came to Canada last year. She says her Dad is very worried he will not be able to find a good job, because there is not enough information about how to find work in our city.  My teacher sometimes helps Asha’s mom to write letters, since there is no more grown-up English school where we live. Asha’s mom said it’s because there isn’t enough information about what new people coming to Canada need, or what languages they speak.

My mom says this too. She is a nurse at a hospital in our city. She works very long hours because there are not enough nurses, because the hospital thought there would be less people getting sick.  It turns out there were more people moving to our city all the time, and now the hospitals are not big enough. Sometimes when people are very sick, they have to wait for a long time to get better.

My Dad drives a big bus in our city. He says that the bus company is hiring lots of people, because they need more buses now that people want to drive less and be green.  People are still the same colour, but I think he means something about the environment.  Dad says that there are not enough buses in some places, and it’s because the bus company only had some old information about where people were going to want to live.

In my project, I am going to write that we used to know more about the people in Canada, where they came from and what they needed.  This stuff is pretty important, especially since my mom and dad wouldn’t have to work so hard, if the hospital and the bus company had more information. If your friends in charge can’t fix it so we have the census again, when I grow up I’ll be Prime Minister so I can fix it.

Yours respectfully,

May

Grade 4, Smith Elementary School

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m an excited aunty-to-be who hopes that my niece or nephew will be counted. Reinstate the long form census of Canada in 2011.