The reviews are in

Dan Gardner is pleased with the opportunity to write about statistical methodology in response to the Cons' attack on the census. But the more important part of his column is his take on why there's still a need to do so:

To turn statistical methodology into a political controversy, a government has to really screw up. But to make statisticians shriek and flap their arms like wounded albatrosses, to cause policy wonks to turn purple with rage, to compel retired civil servants to dispense with a lifetime of discretion and denounce the government's gobsmacking jackassery to reporters ... Well, that's something special.
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As news reports had amply demonstrated, there is no evidence of widespread popular concern about coercion, privacy, and the census -- sensibly enough, as StatsCan is absolutely obsessive about protecting privacy. Further, the expanded reach of the voluntary survey will do nothing to correct the data for bias -- as statisticians had been explaining over and over to anyone who would listen.

By repeating (his) empty claims without the slightest acknowledgement of what the critics had been saying, (Tony Clement) was sticking his fingers in his ears while loudly humming Rule Britannia. It was a gesture of contempt. "I can't hear you!" Clement mocked. "I can't hear you!"

The same day, in The Globe and Mail, Bill Robson, president of the C.D. Howe Institute, gently agreed that changing the census is a mistake but he worried that "the reaction from many opponents risks cementing the government's resolve." Bill's a gentleman who would never approve of potty mouth but that sounds an awful lot like Nancy Ruth warning women's groups to "shut the f--- up" because they're dealing with a pack of vindictive knuckleheads.

Update: And let's note a similar point from Stephen Gordon:

The problem of a biased sampling methodology cannot be fixed by sending out more voluntary questionnaires: all you get is a bigger, biased sample. What's particularly annoying is that Minister Clement is well aware of this point, because I explained it to him personally.

This decision was made without consulting anyone who understands statistics. After two weeks of criticism by everyone who does, the government's strategy is not to explain why the material we teach in statistics courses is wrong. Instead, it chooses to pretend that the material we teach in statistics courses doesn't exist.

Update: let's add Andrew Potter in as well:

Clement’s statistical illiteracy is so profound it gives one vertigo. The notion that simply making the sample bigger can’t fix a skewed sample is something undergraduates learn in first-year classes, yet is somehow beyond the mental grasp of a senior minister of a G8 country. And the comedic benefit of watching Clement fail first-year economics is undermined by the cold realization that he fundamentally does not understand the intellectual foundations of the files that he controls. When he is cornered by his intellectual betters, moreover, Clement’s instinct is to reach for the debating-hall comforts of cheap populism.
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There are libertarians and there are libertarians. When it comes to Tony Clement and James Moore, theirs is not the principled and defensible small-government ideology of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It’s more like the sweaty-palmed fanboy libertarianism forged by too many late nights in high school spent switching between the anti-feminist Nietszcheanism of Ayn Rand and the corporatist space fantasies of sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein.

And this bit of lame ideological freelancing by a couple of rogue (and Twitter-happy) ministers has disturbing resonances with a comment Harper himself made last year. When it comes down to it, he told the Globe and Mail, “I don’t believe any taxes are good taxes,” which is just a short way of saying he believes that literally everything the state does is bad.

Stephen Harper has spent a great deal of time fending off the accusation from the left that he harbours some hidden social-conservative agenda, whose diabolical contours will only be revealed once he achieves his much-feared majority.

But what we should really be concerned with is not that he wants to hand the controls of the ship of state over to a cabal of evangelical end-times wingnuts. Rather, the real worry is that when it comes down to it, he’d sooner see the whole thing scuttled.

(Edit: fixed label.)