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Majority of Castlegar residents paired off

The majority of Castlegar residents over the age of 15 are married or living common law.
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FILE — The crowds congregated in the shade to listen to music during the Kootenay Country Music Festival. (Betsy Kline/Castlegar News)

The majority of Castlegar residents over the age of 15 are married or living common law, according to Statistics Canada.

The organization released results from the 2016 census regarding families, household and marital status on Wednesday, Aug. 2, and of the 6,870 people in Castlegar who are over 15 years old, 58.9 per cent are married or living common law.

Of those, 3,260 or 80.6 per cent are married, while 780 or 19.3 per cent are living common law.

(You may notice that the math here doesn’t quite add up. Asked for an explanation, Statistics Canada informed us that, “The differences you are noticing in the numbers are all due to random rounding. As mentioned in the Guide to the Census of Population (see Chapter 11, last section on Data Suppression), ‘all counts in census tabulations undergo random rounding, a process that transforms all raw counts into randomly rounded counts. This reduces the possibility of identifying individuals in the tabulations.’”)

Of those who are unmarried or not living common law, 1,525 or 53.9 per cent have never been married, 240 or 8.5 per cent are separated, 505 or 17.8 per cent are divorced, and 560 or 19.8 per cent are widowed.

It’s also worth noting that 410 Castlegar residents are between the ages of 15 and 19, and the marital data isn’t broken down by age.

The majority of private households in Castlegar are occupied by what Statistics Canada dubs one-census-family households.

A census family is made up of either a married or common-law couple who may or may not have children living with them, or a lone parent of any marital status who has at least one child living with them.

“Children may be children by birth, marriage, common-law union or adoption regardless of their age or marital status as long as they live in the dwelling and do not have their own married spouse, common-law partner or child living in the dwelling,” according to Stats Canada’s definition.

In total, 2,255 or 64.5 per cent of Castlegar households are occupied by one census family — 1,145 or 50.8 per cent of which don’t have children and 1,115 or 49.4 per cent of which do.

Only 30 or 0.9 per cent of households in Castlegar are occupied by multiple-census families. This could include multigenerational families sharing the same household.

The average size of a census family in Castlegar is 2.7 people and the majority of Castlegar census families — 1,375 out of 2,315 or 59.4 per cent — are two-person families.

The other 1,215 or 34.8 per cent of private Castlegar households are occupied by non-census families. This includes 1,070 one-person households and 145 households with two or more people — which could include roommates or siblings living together.

In total, 1,585 people in Castlegar are not in census families, according to Statistics Canada, though this could still include people who are living with family, as in the sibling example above or in the case where one grandparent is living with their child’s family. In that case the grandparent wouldn’t be included in a census family. On the other hand, if a grandparent is raising their grandchild, and the child’s parent is not present, the two are counted as a census family.

Most people in

Castlegar speak English

Stats Canada also released data on languages.

For the majority of people in Castlegar, their first official language spoken is English — 7,845 or 99.1 per cent — while for 50 or 0.6 per cent its French. Ten Rosslanders reported both English and French as their first official language spoken and 15 reported that neither official language was their first official language spoken.

Most people in Castlegar only reported one mother tongue — 7,830 or 98.9 per cent — and of those 86.0 per cent speak English as their mother tongue, 0.8 per cent French and 13.3 per cent reported languages other than Canada’s two official languages, including Vietnamese, Tagalog, Mlayalam, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Ukrainian, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Persian, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Min Nan, Wu, Lao, Thai, Finnish and Hungarian.

Ninety-five people, or 1.2 per cent of Castlegar residents, reported more than one mother tongue, and of those 84.2 per cent reported English and a non-official language, 10.5 per cent reported English and French, and 5.3 per cent reported English, French and a non-official language.

Most people in Castlegar also reported only speaking one language at home — 7,735 or 97.6 per cent — and of those 97.0 per cent speak English, 0.1 per cent speak French and 2.9 speak other languages, including Tagalog, Croatian, Russian, Afrikaans, German, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, sign language, Cantonese, Mandarin and Lao.

In total, 190 people in Castlegar reported speaking more than one language at home and of those 180 said they spoke English and an unofficial language, and 10 said they speak English and French.