Harper Snubbed at State Funeral - He Caused the Death.

There was a special funeral today and Herr Harper was not invited.

The mandatory long-form census was cancelled in June, chief statistician Munir Sheikh resigned in July and now new documents made public by the agency say the voluntary survey that will replace the long form next year simply won’t measure up.

Statistics Day’s dark mood was captured in a mock funeral for the mandatory long-form census, which the Statistical Society of Canada posted on YouTube. The document was interred as a voiceover expressed sorrow at “her sudden and untimely passing.”

The Economist also covered the story.

TODAY is World Statistics Day—an event you’ve probably never heard of, but which has special resonance in Canada, where one of the hottest political debates of recent months has involved number-crunching. The question of whether responses to the long form of the census, sent to a representative group every five years, should be voluntary or remain mandatory may seem rather technical. But it has pitted the country’s two largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, against the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper; led the country’s chief statistician to resign in protest; and cast a spotlight on the broad array of people who depend on the census and care how it is conducted.

Stephen Harper got his talking points on the gun registry from the American NRA, and his talking points for the census came from Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party.

I hear George Bush is writing his, "why I hate the veterans speech."

I can hardly wait.