Description for Figure 1
Processing of the 2006 Census for record linkage

Figure 1 illustrates the steps involved in processing the 2006 Census to prepare the data for linkage.

The file begins with the 2006 Census respondents (excluding Quebec) (n=23,397,153). From this data file, records with invalid birth date are excluded (n=184,496) resulting in 23,212,657 records. Records with missing sex and/or incomplete postal codes are identified and records are added to the sample to fill these gaps (n=718,471). A total of 23,951,088 Census records with valid linkage keys were eligible for linkage. A series of exclusion were applied to remove duplicate keys, invalid keys identified in the hospital data and keys with birthdates after Census day (May 16, 2006). In the end, 97.6% of linkage keys were identified as in-scope for record linkage (n=23,369,308).