Income data has been used extensively by researchers to better understand the economic well-being of Canadians. To meet the needs of these users, Statistics Canada has produced numerous cross-sectional public use microdata files (PUMFs). PUMFs for the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) were released until reference year 1997. With the end of the SCF, PUMFs for the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) were produced for reference years 1996 to 2011.
The Canadian Income Survey (CIS) was introduced for the 2012 reference year. The CIS is a cross- sectional survey developed to provide information on the income and income sources of Canadians, with their individual and household characteristics. It is a short questionnaire which is asked of a sub- sample of respondents to the Labour Force Survey (LFS), gathering information on labour market activity, school attendance, support payments, child care expenses, inter-household transfers, personal income, and characteristics and costs of housing. The CIS content is supplemented with information from the LFS on individual and household characteristics (e.g. age, educational attainment, main job characteristics, and family type) and with tax data for income and income sources (Statistics Canada, 2016a).
The CIS PUMF is an anonymized microdata file that contains only a subset of variables that are available on the CIS master file. Various techniques have been employed to protect CIS respondents against the risk of disclosure.