A big yay and some statistics
Whew! Go forces of common sense! Yay democracy! Stephen Harper et al.
are screaming about how this issue will never go away. Fools! At last
Canadian apathy will work for us. It's far far harder to get rid of
rights than it is to recognise them in the first place. The new status
quo is marriage for everyone. No one is for taking people's rights away
because they secretly fear they'll be next.
In other news I was on the StatsCan site yesterday. I love StatsCan, you can substantiate any point as long as you have the right statistics to back it up. Looking at the 2001 Canadian Census reveals some interesting information all broken down by region. Being of the wiccan persuasion I was interested to see whether there were any interesting pagan-related patterns revealed by the census.
Of the 26 million and change people surveyed a full 21,080 reported themselves as pagan or wiccan, representing a mere 0.1% of the population. I guess this is why there aren't as many new age bookstores as I'd like. Oddly enough, this is around the same number of lawyers in Ontario, which is a sobering comparison. Still this represents a 281.2% rise since the last census, which is pretty awesome. But then you start to break it down into smaller chunks and things get more interesting. Apparently there are 15 pagans in all of Nunavut, 45 in PEI and 7,565 in Ontario. There are 150 in Nepean alone and I don't know any of them. There are more pagans in Alberta than BC, which surprised me, for some reason.
The average age of pagans in Canada is supposedly 30.5 but I wonder if that has more to do with the sorts of people who were filling out the form. If you're 15 and living with your parents you may not get to fill in the boxes yourself, especially since I think there's only one form per household.
It's funny, I hadn't realised that there were so few of us (though I'm sure there are alot more underground ones). It's a pretty good bet that the 15 in Nunavut don't know one another, which is a shame because they could be going out to movies together. I find I always think of numbers of people in terms of how big of a community it would make if they all lived together. Like if there were a lawyer town of all the lawyers in Ontario it would be a small city whereas the pagan town would be rather small and would probably only rate a single Starbucks (though likely more than one bookstore and candle shop). This line of thought always leads me to think of what it would be like to live in those towns, if we all had to be grouped into homogenous real estate by profession or religion. What would it be like to be involved in a lawsuit and have to make the trecherous journey to lawyer town to get representation? Would pagan town be cool and mysterious or rather flaky? Questions for the ages.
In the end, I think I'd probably like living in lawyer town but I might have a cottage in pagan town to go to on weekends and holidays.
Yikes! I should get out of here and go home. Have a great long weekend everybody!
In other news I was on the StatsCan site yesterday. I love StatsCan, you can substantiate any point as long as you have the right statistics to back it up. Looking at the 2001 Canadian Census reveals some interesting information all broken down by region. Being of the wiccan persuasion I was interested to see whether there were any interesting pagan-related patterns revealed by the census.
Of the 26 million and change people surveyed a full 21,080 reported themselves as pagan or wiccan, representing a mere 0.1% of the population. I guess this is why there aren't as many new age bookstores as I'd like. Oddly enough, this is around the same number of lawyers in Ontario, which is a sobering comparison. Still this represents a 281.2% rise since the last census, which is pretty awesome. But then you start to break it down into smaller chunks and things get more interesting. Apparently there are 15 pagans in all of Nunavut, 45 in PEI and 7,565 in Ontario. There are 150 in Nepean alone and I don't know any of them. There are more pagans in Alberta than BC, which surprised me, for some reason.
The average age of pagans in Canada is supposedly 30.5 but I wonder if that has more to do with the sorts of people who were filling out the form. If you're 15 and living with your parents you may not get to fill in the boxes yourself, especially since I think there's only one form per household.
It's funny, I hadn't realised that there were so few of us (though I'm sure there are alot more underground ones). It's a pretty good bet that the 15 in Nunavut don't know one another, which is a shame because they could be going out to movies together. I find I always think of numbers of people in terms of how big of a community it would make if they all lived together. Like if there were a lawyer town of all the lawyers in Ontario it would be a small city whereas the pagan town would be rather small and would probably only rate a single Starbucks (though likely more than one bookstore and candle shop). This line of thought always leads me to think of what it would be like to live in those towns, if we all had to be grouped into homogenous real estate by profession or religion. What would it be like to be involved in a lawsuit and have to make the trecherous journey to lawyer town to get representation? Would pagan town be cool and mysterious or rather flaky? Questions for the ages.
In the end, I think I'd probably like living in lawyer town but I might have a cottage in pagan town to go to on weekends and holidays.
Yikes! I should get out of here and go home. Have a great long weekend everybody!