Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday.

- The Economist weighs in on the Cons' census debacle:

(I)ntroducing a voluntary census was asking for trouble. The United States once attempted a similar experiment, but abandoned it after determining that data from voluntary surveys are unreliable, since marginalised groups are less likely to fill out the forms. Moreover, in order to keep the sample size constant despite a reduced response rate, the government would have to send out more forms, at an additional cost of C$30m ($29m). Canadians would be paying more money for less accurate information.

As a result, Canada’s statistical gurus staged a rebellion. The government’s chief statistician resigned in protest. Advocacy groups representing Francophone Canadians living outside the French-speaking province of Quebec launched an unsuccessful lawsuit, arguing that programmes for minorities require reliable census data on employment, education and immigration status. The Inuit have made a similar claim. The governor of the Bank of Canada said it uses census data to set monetary policy, and may have to look elsewhere after responses become voluntary. And ministers from Ontario and Quebec say they will no longer know how the labour market is changing and where to target spending on training and education.
...
Despite the uproar, Mr Harper is standing firm. The forms for the 2011 census have been printed, and the prime minister insists it will go ahead as planned, despite a parliamentary motion September 29th and a private member’s bill introduced the next day asking it to reverse course. The UN website promoting October 20th as World Statistics Day says it is meant to “to help strengthen the awareness and trust of the public in official statistics.” At Statistics Canada, currently without a chief statistician, the words have a hollow ring.

And even yesterday's festivities managed to turn up another example of the Cons' disrespect for Statistics Canada and/or basic math:

The first World Statistics Day was celebrated at Statscan on Wednesday with guest speakers, free coffee and enough vanilla cake to feed 400 of the agency’s 6,000 employees. Statistically speaking, that means 93 per cent of staff had to go without.

- From the "people I don't often agree with" file, I'll gladly concur with at least the first half of Warren Kinsella's sentiment here. Now if only we could get his more progressive partymates to recognize that the same can and should apply on the provincial and federal levels...

- And one more in the same category, as Kevin Gaudet gets this much right as part of his otherwise tedious attack on government generally:

TM: Given that the Harper government has run up the federal deficit, and particularly given recent controversial expenditures on G20 security and fighter jets, do you think the Conservatives are politically wise to be attempting to exploit the Liberals' platform shortfall?

KG: The whole "we’re better fiscal managers" conversation is peculiar in Canada because there’s a branding mythology out there that the Conservative Party is one with a strong fiscal history, except that when they govern they don’t seem to have any evidence of that. We can look to the Mulroney government and this government as well, both of which have run some of the largest deficits we’ve seen...I don’t think voters have much of an alternative between either parties (sic) to be honest with you.

- Finally, Dan Gardner's take on Omar Khadr actually deserves attention for its much wider application:

People are tribal. There is Us and there is Them. Us is always a cut above Them. But when the Them in question is as truly vile as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, modest partiality can become overwhelming bias.

In a telling experiment, psychologists asked some Israeli Jews to judge a peace proposal put forward by Palestinians. They said they didn’t like it. Which was interesting because the proposal had actually been drafted by the Israeli government — and other Israeli Jews, who had been told it was an Israeli proposal, rated it much more highly.

If Russians had treated you and John the way Americans did, and if you and John had been involved with a terrorist group people had never heard of, everyone would agree that you had been horribly abused. Yes, they would say, terrorism is odious and must be fought. But nothing justifies brutality and torture, the removal of fundamental human rights, or the punishment of a child soldier as if he were an adult with a choice.

But Russians didn’t do this to you and you weren’t with some group we’d never heard of. It was Us who did this and you were with Them. So it was right. No matter what.

Far off target

Mia Rabson points out an utterly bizarre request from a group which is normally at least somewhat consistent in its public demands:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is pressuring the Liberals and NDP to ensure anti-gun registry MPs get appointed to the committee that will consider a bill to kill the registry when Parliament resumes in March. CTF federal director Kevin Gaudet says if they don't, the bill will likely fail. He argues that as the House already voted in favour of the bill once, it would be anti-democratic of the Liberals and NDP not to give the bill its due.

"I think there is going to be a lot of pressure on both leaders," Gaudet said.

So what's wrong with the request? We can start with the fact that there's no particular reason for the CTF to be taking a particularly strong position on the gun registry in the first place. But let's leave that aside for now and look at the more fundamental problems with the statement.

Even assuming there was some reason for the CTF to take a position as to whether or not a gun registry bill should pass, it would seem to be a rather large leap from agreeing with an idea in principle, to effectively insisting that MPs not work on improving it. Which would be exactly the end result if the CTF's demands were applied generally: the fact that bills had passed second reading would be seen as reason to avoid doing anything to amend them in committee even if a majority of MPs in the committee and the House of Commons alike agree that amendments would result in an improvement.

In effect, in the interest of playing to the base on a single issue, a group which is supposed to be concerned with getting value for public money is asking that Parliament cease to do anything but conduct a single yea-or-nay vote on legislation as presented. Which would presumably result in far more waste than the CTF can possibly allege from the gun registry itself - and more importantly would facilitate the passage of bad legislation as the checks and balances in a multiple-reading system are negated in favour of a declaration that the second-reading vote is the only "democratic" one.

But it gets better yet. Gaudet doesn't just want to tear down Canada's Parliamentary system for the sake of pandering on a single issue, he's also obviously wrong in his assessment of what happens if the bill doesn't get approved by the committee:

Parliamentary rules prevent a committee from killing a bill entirely, but they can report back to Parliament that a bill should not be passed.

So it's nothing short of an outright falsehood to claim that a split committee would actually end the bill's progress: one way or another, it would find its way back to the House of Commons where all MPs would have their say on it. (That is, assuming the Cons don't engineer an election first so they can blame the opposition parties for their choice not to get the bill passed.)

In sum, then, Gaudet seems to have crossed the line from earnest advocacy to blatant misinformation for the sake of pushing an issue which isn't even one of his group's central concerns. And CTF supporters should have reason to question whether they want to encourage that kind of action.