Response to The Chronicle Herald Editorial Board July 23 2010
THE WRONG MAN has quit in Ottawa.
It’s Industry Minister Tony Clement who should have resigned Wednesday.
It’s Mr. Clement who has lost sight of his ministerial duty to protect the integrity of the national census and of Statistics Canada.
It’s Mr. Clement who has settled for being a mere cheerleader for a government political decision to replace the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary survey.
It’s Mr. Clement who has turned a deaf ear to informed census users — provincial governments, health professionals, economists, scientists, researchers, charities — who say the change will seriously degrade data needed to plan things like health and education services, jobless benefits, transportation systems, government budgets and fund-raising.
It’s Mr. Clement who has misled the public by suggesting senior staff at Statistics Canada advised they could offset the risk of degrading long-form data by surveying more people and running ads to encourage compliance.
Government statisticians don’t believe this. We know this from the man who did sadly resign, Chief Statistician Munir Sheik.
In a statement on the StatsCan website, the departing head of the agency said he could not legally comment on his advice to the minister (though he noted the government is free to release it). But he did give us his professional opinion on the “technical statistical issue” at the heart of this controversy: “whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.”
Mr. Sheik’s judgment: “It can not.”
It can’t be said more plainly than that.
How could the minister be so out of touch with his experts’ view? Mr. Clement says he was entitled to assume officials were “comfortable” with a voluntary survey because they produced this option. Let’s see the advice and let the public decide whether the voluntary plan was recommended or just damage control after an imposed political decision.
It’s a sorry tale that no senior ministers would put their jobs on the line to stick up for competent government. They clung to empty titles while a good public servant chose resignation over being used as window dressing.
( edits@herald.ca)
The premise of this opinion is wrong.
Mr. Clement has not lost sight of his duty, far from it. His primary duty as a member of Parliament is to protect the individual from encroachment and harassment by government. And yes he also has a lesser duty ‘to protect the integrity of the national census and of Statistics Canada’ and this has put him in a dilemma; uphold the fundamental rights of citizens or stick with the experts. He made the right choice. The experts are predictably not happy because their task is made harder, hence all the electronic ink spilt on this affair. And this issue is not about the extent of the data collected or whether it is a public or private group who collects it. The issue is the national census conducted in an Orwellian fashion; ‘respond or else’ and Canadians should not stand for that. The principle is clear – one person being press-ganged into participation against their will is not worth the whole government policy formation process.
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:33 am
The response by Atlantica is also uninformed. If the mandatory long form is an affront to my freedom, then so too are income tax forms, drivers licenses, auto insurance, hunting licenses and fishing licenses. They are all mandatory and can result in fines and/or jail if I do not have them.
The government can’t be selective and consistent at the same time.
July 29th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
The coercion of the long form (and all the other forms) is an affront to your freedom. The examples you mention are something quite different; licenses and auto insurance are voluntary and the restrictions involved are designed to stop you from harming others – whether hurting someone with your car and be unable to pay or to stop you from harming a limited resource held in common. All much closer to Mr. Mill’s rule of thumb. But to state that I am harming someone by not participating in a government program they I did not volunteer for and therefore should be fined or imprisoned is a disgrace.
I leave off income tax since that is actually a debatable point.
August 2nd, 2010 at 11:04 pm
“I leave off income tax since that is actually a debatable point.”
How on Earth is income tax a debatable point if requiring people to answer a few questions every 5 years or so is an affront to their freedom? Any form of taxation – by the logic given in the disagreement with a mandatory census – can only be an affront to your freedom. To be consistent, let`s make income tax voluntary too. I can’t think that would cause any problems with government or society in general. And it would be consistent with John Stuart Mill’s thought, no? Or maybe that doesn’t make sense if you actually read and understood most of Mill’s work. But why waste good political rhetoric on trifling details like that…