Statistics Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. S-19

In January 2019, Statistics Canada did something that most Canadians never noticed. Quietly, without a press release designed to reach the general public, without parliamentary debate, and without amendment to any statute, Statistics Canada changed the variable it uses to record the sex of criminals and victims of crime in Canada's national crime database.

The variable "sex" — a biological category — was replaced with "gender" — a self-declared identity. Since that change, a male offender who identifies as a woman is recorded in Canada's Uniform Crime Reporting Survey as a female perpetrator. A male who sexually assaults a woman in a federal prison and identifies as a woman is recorded, in the national crime data, as a female sexual offender.

The Statistics Act did not require this change. Parliament did not vote for it. No minister publicly announced it. The Chief Statistician of Canada made an administrative decision — in consultation with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police — that has fundamentally altered Canada's ability to track violence against women, including violence committed by males housed in women's federal prisons.

This is the story of how Canada's national statistical infrastructure became a tool for hiding male violence rather than measuring it.

What the Statistics Act Does

The Statistics Act establishes Statistics Canada as Canada's central statistical office. Under Section 3, Statistics Canada is mandated to "collect, compile, analyse, abstract and publish statistical information relating to the commercial, industrial, financial, social, economic and general activities and condition of the people of Canada."

The Act grants Statistics Canada sweeping authority to collect data. Under Section 8, the Chief Statistician may require any person, business, or institution to provide information on virtually any subject relevant to national statistics. Section 22 mandates a national census of population every five years — the foundational data collection exercise from which much of Canada's social policy research flows.

The Act also grants Statistics Canada significant discretion in how it collects that data. It does not specify which variables must be included in which surveys. It does not require that biological sex be recorded separately from gender identity. It does not prohibit the substitution of self-declared gender for biological sex.

This discretion is the source of the problem. Statistics Canada used its discretionary authority to make a methodological change — replacing sex with gender in crime reporting — that has profound consequences for women's safety data, without any statutory requirement to do so and without the public scrutiny that a legislative change would have required.

The 2019 Crime Reporting Change

The Uniform Crime Reporting Survey is Canada's primary national database for tracking the characteristics of criminal incidents reported to police. It captures offence type, victim characteristics, and accused characteristics — including, until 2019, the biological sex of both victims and accused.

In 2019, Statistics Canada and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police jointly replaced the sex variable with a gender variable. The new framework asks police services to record the self-declared gender of accused persons and victims, with options including "man," "woman," and "gender diverse."

The stated rationale was inclusivity — ensuring that transgender and non-binary Canadians are accurately represented in crime data. This is a legitimate statistical concern. Transgender individuals do experience crime, including violent crime, at elevated rates, and understanding that experience requires data.

But the solution Statistics Canada chose does not collect additional data. It replaces existing data. Rather than adding gender identity as a separate variable alongside biological sex, Statistics Canada eliminated biological sex and substituted self-declared gender. The result is a dataset that can tell researchers how many people of each self-declared gender were accused of offences — but cannot tell researchers how many biological males were accused of offences, because that variable no longer exists.

For researchers studying violence against women — a field in which biological sex is the defining variable — this is not a methodological refinement. It is a methodological catastrophe. Violence against women is defined by the sex of the victim and the sex of the perpetrator. Replacing both variables with self-declared gender makes it impossible to measure sex-based violence using national crime data.

What This Means for Women's Prisons

The consequences of the 2019 crime reporting change are especially acute in the federal corrections context, where the stakes of accurate data are immediate and physical.

Since the introduction of Correctional Service Canada's self-identification placement policy in December 2017, male-bodied inmates have been housed in federal women's institutions. Some of those inmates have histories of violent and sexual offences. The risk that male-bodied inmates will commit offences against female inmates in women's prisons is the central safety concern driving caWsbar's Charter challenge, filed April 7, 2025.

Now consider what happens when such an offence is reported to police and recorded in the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey under the post-2019 framework.

A male inmate who identifies as a woman — housed in a women's federal institution under CD-100 — commits a sexual assault against a female inmate. The incident is reported. Police record the accused's self-declared gender: woman. The victim's self-declared gender: woman. The offence is entered into the national crime database as a female-on-female sexual assault in a federal correctional institution.

The male perpetrator disappears from the data. The female victim's experience of male violence is recorded as something categorically different. The national dataset that researchers and policymakers use to understand violence in women's prisons cannot reveal that a male committed violence against a woman in a space that was supposed to be sex-segregated. Because Statistics Canada eliminated the variable that would have captured that fact.

This is not a theoretical scenario. It is the operational reality of Canada's crime data infrastructure applied to the consequences of a prison placement policy whose safety implications have never been properly measured — and which the data system has now been redesigned, however unintentionally, to obscure.

The 2021 Census Change

The crime reporting change was not the only significant modification to Canada's statistical framework in this period. The 2021 national census — Canada's foundational data collection exercise, mandated by the Statistics Act — also eliminated the biological sex variable at the population level.

Previous censuses asked respondents to identify their sex as male or female. The 2021 census replaced this with a gender question allowing write-in responses, with guidance that respondents should answer based on their gender identity. Statistics Canada published a separate voluntary survey on sex at birth — the Gender and Sexual Diversity Survey — but this was not included in the census itself, and its results cannot be reliably linked to other census variables at the population level.

The practical consequences cascade through every area of federal policy that relies on census data to measure sex-based gaps and outcomes:

Employment equity reporting — which depends on census data to establish workforce representation benchmarks — now uses gender rather than biological sex as its baseline. The gap between female representation in federal employment and female representation in the Canadian labour force, which the Employment Equity Act was designed to close, is now measured against a population figure that includes self-identified women rather than biological women.

Health research — which depends on census data to study sex-based differences in disease incidence, treatment outcomes, and healthcare access — has lost the population-level sex variable that anchored much of this research.

Violence against women research — which depends on population data to calculate victimization rates by sex — now uses gender rather than biological sex in the denominator, making historical trend comparisons unreliable.

Statistics Canada did not publish a comprehensive impact assessment of these consequences before implementing the census change. The methodological rationale focused on inclusivity for gender-diverse respondents. The implications for sex-based research and policy were treated as secondary.

What the Act Permits and What Has Been Chosen

The Statistics Act does not require Statistics Canada to collapse biological sex and gender identity into a single variable. It does not prohibit collecting both as separate data points. The discretion the Act grants Statistics Canada is broad enough to support a methodology that captures biological sex, self-declared gender, and the relationship between them — a methodology that several national statistical agencies in comparable countries have adopted or are developing.

The UK's Office for National Statistics, following extensive public consultation, committed to collecting both sex and gender identity as separate census variables. The Australian Bureau of Statistics developed a Standard for Sex, Gender, Variations of Sex Characteristics and Sexual Orientation Variables that collects all four dimensions independently. Both approaches acknowledge that biological sex and gender identity are distinct characteristics with distinct policy relevance — and that collapsing them serves neither population well.

Statistics Canada chose differently. The choice was methodological, not statutory. The Statistics Act does not compel it. The Chief Statistician made it. It can be unmade.

What would a reformed approach look like? Statistics Canada could collect biological sex — defined as sex assigned at birth or sex at birth as recorded in medical records — as one variable, and self-declared gender identity as a separate variable. Crime reporting could capture both the biological sex of accused persons and their self-declared gender. The census could restore the biological sex question alongside the gender question.

This would produce richer, more accurate data on both biological women and gender-diverse Canadians. It would restore the ability to track sex-based violence in national crime data. It would allow employment equity programs to measure actual female representation. It would allow health researchers to study sex-based outcomes without confounding them with gender identity data.

Most importantly, it would restore what the Statistics Act was designed to produce: accurate national data that policymakers can use to understand and address the real conditions of Canadians' lives.

The Accountability Gap

The 2019 crime reporting change was never brought to Parliament for debate. It was announced in a Statistics Canada methodology document. The minister responsible — the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, who oversees Statistics Canada — did not make a public statement about the change or its implications for women's safety research.

The 2021 census gender question change was announced as part of Statistics Canada's census planning process. Public consultation occurred, but the consultation focused primarily on inclusivity for gender-diverse respondents. Women's organizations that raised concerns about the loss of biological sex data in the census were not, to caWsbar's knowledge, meaningfully incorporated into the final methodology.

The consequence is a set of policy decisions with profound implications for women's safety data that were made administratively, without legislative authority, without parliamentary debate, and without transparent public accounting for the tradeoffs involved.

The officials responsible for these decisions — the Chief Statistician and the minister responsible for Statistics Canada — made choices that serve one set of policy interests while undermining another. They did so without being required to justify those choices to Parliament or to the Canadian public.

Conclusion: Data Is Not Neutral

Statistics are not neutral. They reflect choices about what to count, how to count it, and whose experience the counting is designed to capture. When Statistics Canada replaced biological sex with self-declared gender in crime reporting, it made a choice about whose experience the national crime data would be designed to measure.

The choice it made means that biological women's experience of male violence — including violence committed by male-bodied inmates in women's federal prisons — is now systematically misclassified in Canada's national crime database. The male perpetrators are recorded as women. The female victims' experience of male violence is recorded as something it is not.

This matters beyond the epistemological. The data produced by the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey informs policing priorities, correctional policy, and legislative decisions about violence against women. If that data cannot distinguish male perpetrators from female ones, it cannot accurately inform any of those decisions.

The Statistics Act gives Statistics Canada the authority to collect accurate national data. It does not require Statistics Canada to collect inaccurate data. The choice to replace biological sex with self-declared gender was a policy choice — one that can and should be reversed, alongside a restoration of biological sex as a mandatory census variable collected separately from gender identity.

Women's safety depends on accurate data. Canada has chosen to make that data less accurate. The Statistics Act permits better. Parliament should require it.