- The National Statistics Council has learned the hard way what should be obvious to anybody who's paid attention for the past four years: any attempt at evenhandedness in even the most obvious condemnation of the Harper Cons will be spun as unconditional support. So just to be on the safe side, it's best to be scathing at all times.
- Take for example Antonia Zerbisias, who goes into detail about the contents of the long-form census along with the comparable means of collecting information in the countries being wrong-headedly pointed to by the Cons as not having a census at all:
(C)arrying anything more than a driver’s license in Canada is never necessary, and even if you do have to turn yours over to a police officer who stops you, it reveals nothing more than the fact that you need glasses to drive and that you have unpaid parking tickets.- Meanwhile, datalibre's compilation of voices for and against the Cons' decision to gut the census is worth a look. But the 295-9 margin of "organizations" opposing the change versus those for it actually manages to underestimate the gap: after all, if Con MP Earl Dreeshen has managed to get listed on the "pro" side, then aren't there a number of opposition MPs who should be similarly included?
Which is why Canadians can go about their business confident that nobody’s minding it.
Not so in many other countries, including Nordic European nations where census taking has been abandoned for the collection of personal information through “administrative data.” In Finland, everybody gets an ID code and electronic chip card. Not only does its national Population Registry require citizens to inform the government of every change of address, the card must be used in bank transactions and the payment of wages.
In Sweden, it’s the tax authorities who maintain population data which include marital and family relationships as well as other personal data.
That’s far more invasive of citizen privacy than Canada’s mandatory long-form census which, until 2006, was sent to one in five households.
But the minority Conservative government intends to do away with it, claiming that its 53 questions are too “intrusive” because, among them, are queries on how many bedrooms your dwelling has and who pays the hydro bill.
That despite how no census form can be linked to any citizen — unlike how, in Finland and Sweden, a person’s identity code reveals everything.
- Finally, a couple of columns on public opinion about Afghanistan are worth pointing out: a surprisingly reasonable piece from David Bercuson to the effect that countries shouldn't be kept at war by their elites when the general public isn't onside, and the one I'd have expected Bercuson to write from Laurent Le Pierres whining that citizens at large haven't fallen for the right's attempt to pitch an indefinite war footing.
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