Well, start bailing, this ship’s goin’ down.
Late yesterday afternoon word came out that Munir Sheikh, the head of Statistics Canada the body responsible for the national census, had canceled a town hall meeting, previously scheduled as an information session for StatsCan employees about the scrapped long-form census. The fact that the meeting was canceled at the last minute raised more than a few eyebrows, and we all waited to see what would happen next. Then, later into the night, the news came: Sheikh was resigning his position.
And now, the boat begins to sink in earnest.
My first issue with the Conservative move to cancel the mandatory long-form census was that it would mean that those that use this data—businesses, municipalities, charities—would no long have access to reliable, accurate data. Canadians would lose good data on their country’s population. My second concern was that the move to scrap the long-form census was a political decision, by a political party, and should never have been made to begin with. Statistics Canada should be at least an arm’s length organization, meaning that the government shouldn’t be able to interfere in it’s business by, for example, scrapping a super important national survey.
But it’s for the first reason I cited, the bad data concern, that Munir Sheikh tendered his resignation and it’s unclear how the Conservatives are going to proceed from here. Truly, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Early in the debate over the termination of the mandatory long-form census Ivan Fellegi, the former head of StatsCan for 23 years, became a vocal critic of the government’s new plan. Sheikh, the country’s top statistician, now adds how voice to the growing chorus of the concerned.
How can the government proceed with their plan to end the long-form census when there are so many critics lining up against them? One really has to wonder. But how did we even get this far to begin with? The timeline is interesting.
When Industry Minister Tony Clement says, as he often has, that their plan was based on the advice of Statistics Canada what he is doing is not really called lying but I think, rather, it’s called not telling the truth. As we’re hearing now, the real timeline is a bit different than he suggests. Clement approached StatsCan with the decision to scrap the long-form census already made. What he asked, then, was what would the best course of action be to take from there. Out of the list of suggestions provided Clement chose the voluntary census option. He has subsequently admitted that the experts within StatsCan would have preferred just to keep the mandatory long-form census. According to an article in the Toronto Star their inside experts at Statistics Canada argue that the voluntary long-form will produce data that is “less reliable and may even be useless.” We already knew that, of course, but now that their chief has stepped down it seems like the rank-and-file are ready to speak out, too.
The ship is sinking and if the government under Stephen Harper thought that they could quietly sneak this through in the middle of the night then they were wrong. It’s clear that the majority of Canadians, including those in the most important places, don’t agree with this move and Tony Clement, who has been obnoxiously vocal about this issue on his Twitter account, has suddenly gone silent. For what it’s worth, the rumour mills are turning out talk at top speed suggesting that Clement never really supported the plan to begin with, he was merely towing the party line, as is often the case in Harper’s government.
At any rate, I imagine that the Conservative caucus is hauled up in a little room somewhere in Ottawa deciding who’s going to man the life rafts, and who’s going to go down with the ship.
I sent a letter to my MP today explaining the benefits of keeping the mandatory questionnaire.