It’s March Break and I’m catching up on my reading. Between finishing installments in the Harry Potter series, I’ve been working my way through back issues of The Walrus.

There’s a lot of interesting reading in there but one article that struck a pretty deep chord was Erna Paris’ The New Solitudes which is available online (and makes me wonder why I subscribe to the print edition at all!).

Paris hits on something I’ve been wondering and worrying about for some time now. I’ve written about it here before, and I’ll continue to lament, I’m sure, until things improve. It’s the idea that Canada’s values are eroding, or, at least, changing. It’s the notion that instead of the two solitudes in Canada being the English and the French we are quickly becoming a nation not of two different languages but of two very different sets of values or identities, and they seem at odds with one another.

Let me explain.

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My wife, Maria, and I got together with some friends over the weekend to enjoy a meal, some games, and to chat. The chats were enlightening—except for my contributions, of course—and, like conversations all across this country, the topic of the long-form census came up. Now I know everyone who’s been writing about the census keeps bringing up the fact that it’s so dog-gone strange to be talking about such an obscure topic in the heat of the summer but, really, it is worth saying. Here we are, in the middle of the summer, talking about our national survey. Who would’ve thought. But the fact that the topic is still so talked about—that it isn’t going away—is particularly interesting to me.

My friends and I are from a particular segment of society. We’re young. We are, as one of my friends pointed out, “highly-educated” compared to most standards. Some of us were raised in a conservative tradition, others more liberal, and all of us are involved in the life of our local communities in some way. All of us agreed that scraping the long-form census was a very bad idea but beyond that, as the conversation evolved, it became clear that we also harboured a deep-seeded worry as well.

The worry that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives might one day win a majority.

This is the worry, and I know we’re not alone.

“What would he do with a majority?” a friend asked, “look what he’s doing under a minority government when his power is restricted.”

Indeed, it’s something to be concerned about.

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I love it, the debate surrounding the long form census. It’s exciting, it’s engaging, and if nothing else it’s great to see (and hear) that this kind of discussion can be had in this great country of ours. It can be, right?

If you’ve read my blog for more than a little bit then you know that I try my best to present a non-partisan view of things. Really, I try, but sometimes honesty can be mistaken for partisanship, I think, if you read me the wrong way. For example, I could say something like, “Stephen Harper runs a tight ship, giving little to no control over to his Ministers, with even the smallest governmental details passing across his desk,” and you could mistake that for a pot shot at our Prime Minister. But, truly, I’m not one for pot shots and when I say something like that I mean it as more of a fact than an opinion. The sentence following that one will be an opinion, but that’s more obvious. And why is this so important? Because I believe that a discussion about scrapping the mandatory long form census should be one that transcends politics altogether, let me tell you why.

Stephen Harper runs a tight ship, giving little to no control over to his Ministers, with even the smallest governmental details passing across his desk. I don’t necessarily agree with his style, but that’s why I didn’t vote for him. Still, while a lot of the time this kind of control factor can be nothing more than bothersome for policy makers and politicians it can be, at times, detrimental to our national health and identity. There are examples of this in the national housing strategy, our international agreements, and key pieces of criminal justice legislation. Harper has the final say and sometimes the only say, it seems. Discussion be damned, and for certain issues this simply does not fly; in my opinion the long form census is one of those issues.

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