Counting on Canadians

ADMIT when you’re wrong, do what’s right and move on. It’s good advice that anyone can use but which is steadfastly ignored by a Canadian government running on a dangerous mix of ideology and pig-headedness.
The list of its own advisers, many of them Tory appointments, who’ve been vilified or shuffled aside for no good reason is growing by the week. Employees paid very good money to amass information and present the government with unbiased recommendations are routinely ignored and marginalized when that advice runs counter to Conservative policy, much of it unofficial and most of it from the controlling mind of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Good people making sound decisions on everything from nuclear power to Afghan detainees, from MPs’ expenses to the budget have learned that messing with the PM’s power tools risks losing face and position.
The bull-headed decision to scrap the long-form census has shocked so many Canadians that it is difficult to count the number of organizations opposing the move. Former Statistics Canada chief Munir Sheikh quit rather than provide political cover for a policy choice he believes is fundamentally wrong. Those who concur include at least five provinces, most major municipalities and organizations representing just about every public pursuit in the land. The Canadian Association for Business Economics is the latest to warn the government about the perils of dispensing with precious data. It would be much easier to identify those agencies who support the proposal, if indeed any have come forward.
The proposal stands on two foundations: The census is intrusive and the government won’t abide anyone being charged and jailed for failing to reveal personal information. Except that the Privacy Commissioner has received only a handful of complaints over the years and no one’s ever been formally punished for refusing to fill out a census.
Doesn’t matter. It’s toast.

Here is what Thunder Bay would not know in detail without information gleaned from the last census. (Will city council throw its weight onto the long list of those opposing this silly move?)
Senior citizens make up 16 per cent of the population who live in and around Thunder Bay — a larger proportion than five years ago. How do we plan for that if we don’t know the numbers?
The last census revealed not only that the baby boomer generation accounts for 31.5 per cent of the population in the Thunder Bay region, up from 2001, but breaks that down into age segments so that planners know how fast boomers’ health and old age care requirements are approaching.
The urban aboriginal population is already growing faster than many services can manage.
There are about 3,500 more females than males in Thunder Bay and their numbers are growing faster than men’s.
Without quantitative information from the long-form census, we will not be fully aware of things such as ethnic origin, disability, educational status, household work, income and housing.
“If you are one of the many Canadians who would like their governments to do less but do it better, this spectacle risks making you tear your hair,” wrote William Robson, president of the C.D. Howe Institute and a member of the National Statistics Council, in a piece published here last month.
Parents should be concerned. Thunder Bay’s Lori Lukinuk, vice-president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, joined the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association in decrying the pending loss of reliable data, that “is particularly important here in the North.”
The Lakehead Social Planning Council wrote here to say: “For municipalities and community-based service and funder organizations, the integrity of Statistics Canada’s long form census data is paramount in ensuring the accuracy of resource allocations to meet the needs of communities.” A voluntary household survey, as proposed by the government, cannot be relied upon, the council insists.
The conclusion is elementary, the opposition immense. Will Ottawa listen to reason or will Canadians let this government abandon the lion’s share of the work of the world’s most respected statistics gathering agency just because it wants to, because it thinks that it can?