How Can we Save the Census With no Senate?

The Toronto Star has learned from an access to information request, that the Conservatives scrapped the long-form census on the basis of only a handful of complaints.

The Conservative government listened to only a relative handful of Canadians — including conspiracy theorists afraid the government was going to round them up — before scrapping the mandatory long-form census, according to documents obtained by the Toronto Star.

Canadians were unhappy with so-called intrusive questions, the aggravation of filling it out and even a few were convinced the census was part of a government plot, according to Statistics Canada documents obtained under Access to Information.

But there is virtually no overwhelming evidence in the
Statistics Canada documents to support the government’s contention of widespread privacy concerns — the very argument it used this summer to kill the mandatory long-form census.

I was optimistic when I read that a Liberal bill to save it had passed second reading. But then I remembered that the neocons now control the senate so they'll just rubber stamp it "denied" without debate.

And this is what passes for democracy in Harperland.

Tony Clement's Troubles Continue Over Census Debacle

Aboriginal Canadians are challenging the Harper government's decision to end the mandatory long-form census, as being unconstitutional.

The federal government’s decision to scrap the long-form census constitutes a violation of Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a lawyer representing a coalition of Atlantic aboriginals told Federal Court on Monday. Anne Smith said the shorter replacement for the mandatory, long-form census — the voluntary national household survey — will produce skewed data.

“It’s not a representative survey if it’s not mandatory,” Smith told the court. As a result, it will be difficult for the government to discharge its constitutional duties to aboriginal peoples, she said. The lawyer said about 98 per cent of the long forms are filled out and returned, but only about 40 to 50 per cent of voluntary surveys are ever returned. She said the data resulting from a smaller sample size could prompt the government to conclude that services are no longer required for aboriginal people.

We also learned that the promised 30 million in ads, was misrepresented by Tony Clement.

Industry Minister Tony Clement said that $30 million in spending had been earmarked to encourage Canadians to fill out the survey and the short census. But Statistics Canada told The Canadian Press that $5 million of that money will cover extra printing costs, since more households will get the voluntary survey. And another $10 million of the pot is now going toward adding two extra questions on language into the short census.

The plot thickens.

Is Stephen Harper Hoping for a Do Over?

The most vivid memories I have of my father are first, the image of him asleep with a book in his hand. He was a voracious reader and an extremely intelligent man.

The second was his enormous knowledge of history. Not the history we were taught in school, but real history.

I used to sometimes hide my school books, because if he read them, he would constantly critique their content. "Lies .... lies ... more lies".

He had a unique heritage, though not really unique for the Maritimes. His mother was Acadian, her grandmother French-Canadian. His paternal grandparents were Irish-Catholic, who escaped the Irish genocide, dubbed the "potato famine". And most of his history lessons were passed down from them.

If I had listened to his version then, however, I would have surely failed, but have since realized just how right he was. Much of our written history was fabricated.

My father told me once that the most dangerous man in history was not Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, but a preacher by the name of Francis Parkman, because he did with his pen, what couldn't be accomplished with a sword.

He conquered the indigenous people of Canada.

But to accept his version of history, you would have to believe that 13 Frenchmen at Kebec, and 50 more at Port Royal, governed millions of First Nations people. And then of course, the English conquered the French, and all lived unhappily ever after.

In the words of my father: "Lies, lies and more lies."

I wasn't intending to give a history lesson here, but a friend sent me a link to an article in the Vancouver Sun, and I immediately thought of Parkman and my father.

Stephen Harper may be hoping for a do over. A clean slate, to write his own history. And he is doing it with the long-form census.

Don Cayo asks:

How will the Canada of the not-very-distant future look through the eyes of a statistician?

"Rosy," predicts Ivan Fellegi, who retired two years ago after 51 years at Statistics Canada, 23 of them as chief statistician. We'll be seen to be richer than we were just a few years earlier, not to mention better educated and more universally able to communicate in Canada's two official languages. Of course, it won't be true. This will be a distorted picture painted by the 2011 census.

Because the voluntary nature of the census, will exclude many of the people the mandatory census would have been able to help.

And the Harper government will be able to establish policy based on the misconception that Canada has no poor people. No immigrants struggling with language. No women seeking equity. No aboriginal people falling further behind.

He has conquered all of our social problems with an eraser.

And yet if you speak to people you certainly don't get a "rosy" picture.

Like the woman who volunteers at a soup kitchen. They used to get eggs from the Prison Farms that the Harper government closed, and are now scrambling for donations. And as she explains, eggs are critical, because egg salad sandwiches are a favourite. High in protein but also easy to eat since many of their clients have no teeth.

Or another who has worked at Social Services for more than 20 years, and has found that most of her newest intake are people who have worked most of their lives and now find for the first time, that they have to accept what they once thought of as "charity". She said that she can identify them without even looking at the file, because they never look her in the eye. Their shame is palpable.

And the brilliance of this decision is that if he's reminded of the realities, he can rightly claim that the "statistics" show otherwise.

"Lies, lies and more lies."

Canada Now Being Governed by Ideology and Propaganda

When Stephen Harper was first running for the top job, as head of the Alliance Party in 2004, two words were prevalent from the opposition: "ideology" and "agenda".

In 2006, the same two words were common, but were then dismissed as hyperbole.

Now we have a prime minister running our country based on pure ideology and with a frightening agenda.

But first he silenced his caucus, then he silenced the media, the public service, scientists, experts, and advocacy groups.

Now he is silencing us. First by having us beaten up, and now by having us beaten down.

And he is doing that by eliminating a detailed census.

If he has no statistics, then he has no facts getting in his way.

Munir Sheikh, former chief statistician of Canada, rightfully claims that the Lack of census data will imperil policy-making.

But of course, we know the problem was that the census itself imperiled Stephen Harper's policy-making. Those damn facts. If it wasn't for them and those pesky Canadians he could get things done.

And Antonia Zerbisias in the Star, also raises women's issues that will be eliminated with the lack of accurate data.

The dangers imposed by this government are so tangible and yet illusive to the majority of Canadians. Why is that?

Economist Marilyn Waring, a former New Zealand cabinet minister, is quoted in the piece by Zerbisias:

“I see this mirrored in so many conservative governments in the post-recession period. They want to rule according to ideology not according to evidence. So one of the most important things they can do is to obliterate evidence so they can operate on the basis of propaganda.’’

It's absolutely frightening. But I'm not as afraid of Stephen Harper as I am of the current Canadian psyche.

"The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda - before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent any one's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world - lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world." - Hannah Arendt

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.

The ACORN Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree When it Bonks Harper on the Head

It's taken me a while, but I've been able to reduce the complexities of Stephen Harper into three simple facts.

1. He is a malignant narcissist

2. He was indoctrinated by the anti-communist, anti-liberalism crowd.

3. He is a Republican.

So if the media or political pundits want to try to make sense of what this man does, they just need to remember those three things. He is driven by his own self-importance, a visceral hatred of liberalism and an undying love for anything Republican.

Which brings me to the census issue.

We Should Have Looked South in the First Place

ACORN is an organization that advocates for affordable housing for low and mid-low income families. Barack Obama once acted as their attorney and as a result the Tea Party/Republican crowd hates them. The anti-liberalism crowd detests them for advocating for the poor, and the Religious Right condemns them because they are trying to interfere in God's master plan.

They also advocate for gun control, a livable wage, minorities ...

In other words, they are doomed in the current American political climate.

I had blogged on them before when tracking the parallel movements of the Leadership Institute, Manning Centre for Democracy and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Morton Blackwell, founder of the LI was involved in a plot to undermine the work they do. And bragged about it. You can read the story here.

Well, apparently ACORN was given the job of compiling census information and the Tea Party crowd are steeped and steaming.

One of their tea waggin' queens, Michele Bachmann, is encouraging Americans not to fill out their census forms, calling them an "intrusion" and highlighting the fact that failure to comply could result in a $ 5,000 fine. And despite the fact that no one has ever actually BEEN fined in the history of the census, her whistle is going off.



But there is a problem with the tea baggers plans to boycott the census. If they don't weigh in they could be thrown out of any decisions when it comes to the allocation of funds. Tea stained states could suffer as a result.

Google 'Tea Party' and 'census' and listen to the rhetoric the American right is using. It is almost verbatim what we're hearing from Stephen Harper, Maxime Bernier and Tony Clement. "Law abiding citizens shouldn't be penalized", "it's an intrusion", etc., etc., etc.

The Harperites claim to have been in consultation with stakeholders since 2006, but as David McKie discovered recently, no such consultations ever took place.

The response to my request for such studies was disappointing: "Having completed a thorough search, we regret to inform you that we were unable to locate any records responsive to your request."

But Mckie was looking in the wrong place. He should have just invited himself for 'tea' with Bachmann.

Another Harper "Enemy" Feels His Wrath: StatsCan

Another group that has been added to Stephen Harper's "enemy" list in his war on facts, StatsCanada, is facing a substantial decrease in their budget, for challenging Harper's misguided decision to scrap the mandatory long-form census.
This is not good for the future of our country.

Statistics Canada, already reeling from the long-form census debacle, is chopping at least five surveys after being ordered to find $7 million in savings. The beleaguered agency plans to drop a pair of environmental surveys, a health report and two sets of business statistics, along with other measures to meet budgetary demands from the Conservative government.

"If we keep going down this path ... we are at serious risk of eroding the quality of our statistics to unacceptable levels," Munir Sheikh, then chief statistician, warned in a May 31 letter to Treasury Board weeks before he quit his post over the long-form census controversy. "Our collections systems are becoming outdated, we have less than optimal levels of automation of our processes and we suffer from a lack of proper documentation that can be risky."

Cuts their funding, but is still going through with corporate tax cuts, prisons for imaginary prisoners and useless fighter jets. Seven million after promising 200 million to a professional hockey team becasue it's owned by his Fox News North buddy.

When will Canadians say "enough is enough".

If Just One Person Complaining Will Cause This Government to Act, I Have a Complaint

In a continuation of the Harper government's weak arguments for scrapping the long form census, Tony Clement is now saying that even if there is only one dissenting voice, that's reason enough to make the change.

But it's been a journey for poor Tony to reach that level of enlightenment.

At first he simply lied, suggesting that this was all StatCanada's idea:

The Harper government asserted that the voluntary long form option was an idea put forth by Statistics Canada, when in reality the department was in favour of the mandatory long form option (which is supported by virtually all of Canada’s leading business, academic, government, and civil society groups). Also advocating for the mandatory long form option were Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada, and the governments of Ontario and Quebec, which have decades of experience using the data provided by the census. In a letter dated September 11, 2010, the minister of industry, Tony Clement stated, “The chief statistician has indicated that this new approach will provide useful and usable data that can meet the needs of many users.”

Then he, with the help of the hapless Maxime Bernier, just started making stuff up.

An Industry Canada employee questioned Conservative MP Maxime Bernier's claims in July that as minister he received about 1,000 complaints a day about the mandatory long-form census, internal documents obtained by CBC News show. Maxime Bernier said in July his office received about 1,000 complaints a day about the mandatory long-form census when he oversaw it in 2006 as industry minister. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)The former industry minister, now a Conservative backbencher, said in July of this year that he was blitzed by complaints when he oversaw the 2006 census as minister.

However, in a July 18 email found among documents obtained by CBC News through an access-to-information request, ministry employee Paul Halucha asked a high-ranking official at Statistics Canada whether the agency had any numbers to back up Bernier's statement. Industry Canada's "internal survey of correspondence did not show anything close to a thousand a day," he wrote to Statistics Canada's Connie Graziadei, adding in brackets "we got a standard 25-30 a year."

And the majority of those complaints were because our census forms are now being processed by the arms dealer Lockheed-Martin.

The blogger Vanity Press has invited her readers to issue their 'one complaint'. But maybe we should create a scroll. Everyone write down their 'one complaint', sign it and we'll send it to the government. That way we'll be able to set the agenda.

But let's not kid ourselves. We all know whose 'one' voice this really was. The only voice now allowed in this country.