Sunday July 25, 2010
Discrediting Canada’s census data
By Jim Taylor
“The government,” former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once declared, “has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”
In hindsight, I suspect he was actually telling the nation to stay out of _his_ bedroom. Trudeau –still a bachelor at the time – was reputed to have numerous, umm, celebrity liaisons.
Whatever Trudeau intended, current Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken Trudeau’s maxim to an extreme. He has decided that the government not only has no business in the nation’s bedrooms, it also has no business knowing about citizens’ education, incomes, origins, or anything else that people might consider an invasion of privacy.
Harper plans to make completing the long form of the Canadian census voluntary.
Everyone gets the short form. It asks basic questions about Canadians’ age, sex, marital status, and language that everyone must answer. The long-form – with 61-additional questions – goes to every fifth household.
By making it voluntary, Harper effectively makes it meaningless.
"No statistician in their right mind would believe that this provides an [adequate] information base," Don McLeish, president of the Statistical Society of Canada and professor at the University of Waterloo, states flatly.
And simply increasing the sample, says McLeish, reveals “a misunderstanding of statistics.”
Meaningless data
When I worked at the United Church Observer, long ago, we surveyed the 300,000 subscribers’ attitudes to social issues, prayer, new hymn books, etc.
One survey drew over 10,000 responses. But statisticians considered the results meaningless. They conveyed nothing about the 290,000 subscribers who chose – for whatever reason – not to respond.
Any generalizations about the United Church’s million or so members therefore depended on our personal belief that those 10,000 respondents truly represented the church as a whole.
By making the long form voluntary, Harper makes Canadian census statistics equally suspect.
Representatives of the United Way, Canadian Institute of Planners, Canadian Labour Congress, Canada West Foundation, Canadian Public Health Association, Canadian Association of University Teachers, Canadian Council on Social Development, Canadian Economic Association and Toronto Board of Trade all signed a letter protesting a voluntary census.
“We are all users of information derived from the census long-form questionnaire… The loss of these data would impair our operations,” their letter stated. “For many of us this would mean a less efficient use of money we collect from Canadians, in some cases via government grants.”
Ideological blindness
But reasoned arguments are unlikely to change Harper’s mind. Like all right-wing politicians, he harbours an ingrained antipathy to anything that resembles government intrusion in people’s lives.
As the Ottawa Citizen editorialized, “One of the preoccupations of the Conservative party is ‘freedom’ from government interference… and what more tangible sign of unacceptable meddling than a lot of personal questions about race, education, religious beliefs and income?”
But this antipathy is not a rejection of government power. If Harper – and his U.S. counterparts, the Republican Party and its lunatic fringe, the Tea Party – really believed in less government, they would do away with themselves. They show no signs of doing that.
Rather, they seek power. And once in power, they cling to it ferociously.
Discrediting Statistics Canada plays into that lust for power. As Jeffrey Simpson ranted in the Globe and Mail, the Conservatives display “disregard, even contempt, for ‘expert’ information and analysis.
“When it comes to their core ideology… no facts, no expert opinions, no learned arguments from inside or outside the government will deter them.
“From ‘tough on crime’ to social policy, Conservatives almost delight in ignoring what people experienced in the field have to say. Facts that don’t fit ideology or partisan gain are distinctly unwelcome.”
Thus the nuclear regulatory agency felt the government’s wrath, for fulfilling its mandate. Food inspection got slashed. Now StatsCan finds itself in the government’s gunsights.
Facts vs perceptions
Disembowelling these services means that government can intervene based on nothing more than ideology.
For example, the numbers, rates, and severity of crimes dropped again last year, continuing a ten-year trend. Only firearms offences increased.
That’s fact – whether or not it matches public perceptions.
But the Conservative government pushes a tough-on-crime agenda, even as it dismantles the gun registry.
Not because the registry is useless. Canada’s police forces uniformly want to keep it.
Nor because it costs too much – about $4 million a year, or roughly the cosmetic improvements made for the G8/G20 summits in Industry Minister Tony Clement’s riding and in downtown Toronto (the “fake lake” alone cost $1 million).
But because hard-core conservatives see it as government interference in people’s private lives.
Both Clements and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty opposed a voluntary long form, according to Jeffrey Simpson: “Both wrote the Prime Minister underscoring the importance of the mandatory long-form census to compile the most accurate statistics on which so much public policy and private-sector decision-making depends…
“But, as with everything in Mr. Harper’s Ottawa, the Prime Minister decides.”
Harper castrates the census because his mind is made up; he does not want to be bothered with facts.
He wants absolute authority. In Ottawa, Harper is Boss. Harper is King. Harper may even be God.
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Your Turn
“I just finished reading your piece on the Gulf disaster,” Chuck Johnson wrote. “This is honestly the best writing I have seen on this terrible tragedy. Thank you for your concern for our environment, your clarity in spelling out the details of the disaster, and the forthright way you tell the truth. I read your musings faithfully and I appreciate the honor of being on your mailing list.”
Thank you. I’m flattered.
Ron Quillian knows a lot more about oil wells than I do. He wrote, “I called south Louisiana ‘home’ except for the past 40 years while I was engaged in the oil industry in Canada.
“I think you may have misquoted Matt Simmons. The static formation pressure of the well is not 100,000 psi, more likely around 10,000 psi. This estimate is derived by multiplying the hydrostatic gradient of fresh water of 0.433 psi/foot by the total depth of the well measured from sea-level (about 20,000 ft.). If I assume that the well bore currently contains an oil column 8,333 ft in length, this equates to a static pressure of 3,250 psi (8,333 X 0.390 psi/foot oil gradient). Subtract this from 10,000 psi yields the current static pressure reported by BP of 6,750 psi. So I don’t see any cause to leap to the conclusion that the well is leaking from the sea-floor elsewhere. Sea-floor rifts are common throughout the earth’s oceans and major gulfs.
“As to journalist Dahr Jamail’s visit near Barataria Bay, the atmosphere of south Louisiana frequently carries that acrid smell even when I was there in the mid-’50s. It comes from the numerous gas plants, chemical plants, and oil refineries within the region. Often the July sun has stung my skin just walking down a street in New Orleans.
“Linda McQuaig’s comment about “blind faith in technology and human ability to solve any problem” unreasonably dodges the real cause of the blowout — the failure of state regulatory authorities to supervise and control rig operations at a critical point of activity. The Horizon blowout was not so much technological failure as what appears to be the laisez-faire, incompetence of state regulatory officials. Had state officials stepped in and required rig personnel to test and repair the damaged stack this tragedy would not have occurred.”
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NEW PARAPHRASE AVAILABLE
I write paraphrases so that I can understand the Bible. And one of the most bewildering books, for me, has been Revelation.
Then one day my minister suggested that I was reading it wrong. I was concentrating on the prophecies, the interpretations of the visions, the explanations of the symbols. I should be reading it as a verbal painting.
Without most of the speeches and proclamations, Revelation turns into a massive visual tapestry, an epic narrative. In most of my paraphrases, I have tried to replace archaic metaphors and images with more modern ones, and to replace desert based illustrations with some that we who live in more northern climes might find more familiar. I have not done that this time. I have simply excised the blather that gets in the way of John’s magnificent panorama of rebellion and victory.
I’m offering this paraphrase of Revelation on the honour system, the same way as my other paraphrases (except for Psalms, which you have to order through the publisher). If you want to examine my paraphrase of Revelation, just write me. I will send it to you as a Microsoft Word file. If you decide you want to keep the paraphrase, you send me a cheque for $5 Canadian; if you decide it’s not worth that much, just delete the file and send nothing.
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- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
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