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 Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

The paper trail

by Aaron Wherry on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 5:22pm - 0 Comments

The Canadian Press has an early dispatch on the census documentation released to the industry committee today. Kady O’Malley posts a few bits of correspondence.

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  • Emily

    This isn't going away anytime soon.

  • Matlock

    My favourite, in rebuttal to adopting a Scandinavian-type database system:

    "Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain and Italy have entirely different systems to get their census data. They link data from various sources available to different parts of government. When data are needed, but not available, they are collected in a traditional manner.

    The proportions of data obtained from these two types of sources differ significantly across these countries. Needless to say, our privacy laws would impede our ability to pursue such an approach. Furthermore, they are expensive systems overall, taking into account all their costs."

    This puts in a very weird context any Tory talking points on scrapping a mandatory census in favour of the Scandinavian approach… such an approach would explicitly violate our privacy laws. So, in order to protect Canadians privacy, we should adopt an approach that violates our privacy. I think this is another example of this argument not being self-consistent.

    • Mike T.

      Except that the CPCs haven't opted in favour of the Scandanavian approach. they've just made our own system worse and more expensive for no adequate reason.

      • Anon 001

        Harper knows best. Remember, he is an internationally renowned economist, and part-time hockey book writer.

    • Richard

      And Scandinavian countries, generally speaking, aren't decentralized federal states like ours. It took Canada 50 years to get provinces to share speeding tickets with one another. Health records will likely take another 50. Census-calibre statistics? Forget about it.

  • Wascally Wabbit

    @CharlesH – you are assuming they (i.e. the politcal side) leaked the documents.
    the way the folks at Stats. Can must be feeling right now – where down is up and vice versa – someone probably "misread" the garbled instructions coming down from Clement's CoS and thought he was ordered to give this stuff to the committee.
    I suspect that we are going to see a lot more of these "whoopises" over the next few weeks…
    The Census Torture Treatment

    • Charles H.

      All the news reports contain the line that the document dump was (to quote CP's wording) "provided by a government source" — which is generally not used to refer to the civil service, hence why I assume that it's the govt. themselves who leaked them.

      • Anon 001

        Could be PCO. Could be that Wayne Wouters, the Clerk, has had enough of the lying, and is not willing to take the blame for this blunder.

  • Dee

    Tony Clement is a liar. What a shocker. It's time for him to submit his resignation as a cabinet minister since he clearly doesn't deserve the trust of Canadians.

    • brooster

      The Cons can't afford to dump Landslide Tony from cabinet now…they've invested mega-millions in his riding.

      • Curious

        That's Tugboat Tony now, BTW.

  • wilson

    "On a voluntary census, we can get up to 65-70 per cent response rate, which is still not an acceptable outcome for a census," a StatsCan staffer wrote.

    When Don Drummond testified, he said 2% is enough of a response,
    as long as it's representative.

    • Bob

      ???? Doubt it. The only way to make sure it's representative is to get more than 90% to respond!!

    • Matlock

      "When Don Drummond testified, he said 2% is enough of a response, as long as it's representative."

      If you agree with this, I think you're finally learning some proper statistical theory here. Yes, sending the long form to 1 in 50 would be a representative sample if it was a mandatory census. We ensure it is representative of the population by ensuring response rates are uncorrelated with other socioeconomic factors (e.g. education, income, etc). The only way to ensure there is no correlation is to enforce a 100% response rate among this 2% of the population, i.e. a mandatory census. Otherwise, people self-select into response and non-response groups which may be determined by their socioeconomic status.

      As an economist, I would much prefer a mandatory census sent to 1 in 50 people over a voluntary survey sent to 1 in 3. To paraphrase what I've explained (and what Don Drummond explained), pure sample size has little to do with it, it is the representativeness of the sample you collect.

    • OntarioTown

      Clement has deceived you – does that not bother you?

  • tedbetts

    The more I read from these emails, the more disgusted I get with our government.

    Culture of deceit, indeed.

    But it is not merely the outright lying and trying to force civil servants to say things they know are not true just to cover your own butt.

    It is that they have made a policy decision based upon a perceived principle, but know that their principles are so out of whack with Canadians that they have to hide it and bury it and lie about the real reasons they are doing it.

    It's beyond not having the courage of your convictions but deceitful to the core and to the point of being anti-democratic. Once again.

    They would have gained the respect of Canadians if they could state their principles and stick to them. Look at how Mike Harris won back to back victories in Ontario, with a greater majority (both seats and popular vote) because he said what he was going to do, he told us why and then he did it. He did a lot of things wrong and left a lot of carnage we are still recovering from, but in that he was the ideal politician. Or Cameron in the UK. It is possible to be a conservative and stick to your principles in government and be honest about it.

    By contrast, we have federally Mr. Say Anything Steve, Mr. Deceivin' Stephen and his coterie of lying bobbleheads who arrogantly think they know better and are better than the rest of us and are doing us favours by imposing their values without consulting us.

    • brooster

      I agree…there was a time, early in this minority government's tenure, when I tended to dismiss opposition claims of a Con/Reform "hidden agenda" as over-the-top conspiracy theory paranoia.

      I no longer dismiss such fears…those at the core of this regime are dangerous and their underlings in the backbenches are eunuchs.

  • PeteTong

    Oh bureaucratise. You have to admire the way they tell each other off with so much civility. It's like the nobility in HBO's rome. You can't directly offend someone so you just stop copying them on the email chain. "Keep informed in real time".

  • knick

    The Harper government's audacity in deliberately lying to us about who is responsible for this decision and trying to force civil servants to play along simply boggles the mind. Watching them defend this indefensible decision is like watching a 3-year-old looking all innocent and baffled at your annoyance when he tries to microwave the canary.

  • tedbetts

    This is not going to help their cause.

    "On a voluntary census, we can get up to 65-70 per cent response rate, which is still not an acceptable outcome for a census… and will require a substantial amount of additional funding ..": Email between Statistics Canada and Industry Canada on May 2009 test census in Montreal and Red Dear (March 17, 2010)

    No wonder they oppose accountability and have the worst Access to Information record of any government and have been strongly criticized in report after report by the Information Commissioner: Facts and data always seem to undermine their case.

  • Charles H.

    I'm wondering just why they leaked the docs. About all I can come up with is that they're hoping that giving the media advance time to maul them over it will reduce the damage done had the committee been the ones to get access first.

    It can't be that they think the documents released will help their case any, given that they contradict a good deal of their earlier talking points. (I know, I know: a memory longer than a week is not considered an asset in politics.)

  • Stewart_Smith

    I feel sorry for some good soldiers at StatsCan who let it be known the emperor has no clothes.

  • Dan

    They probably just wanted to pick which journalists got to the story first and framed the debate. Didn't seem to help too much in this case, but if you were the Conservatives would you let the Liberals pick which journalist should get the copies first?

  • Amateur Hour

    If this were a real political party, Clement would be out. For a host of reasons, political parties often sacrifice its Ministers when they botch their files, are caught lying, or even to clear the air when there's a cloud of suspicion, etc., for the good of the party and to appear responsible. Often, the short term hit to the party's reputation is more than made up for by their demonstration of maturity and accountability.

    The CPC is not a political party. It's Harper and a coterie of bobbleheads. How scary is this? It's one thing to be governed by a party you disagree with, even vehemently. It's quite another to be governed by a cult leader and followers who feel no responsibility to their office, to the rule of law or to the people in whose name they govern.

    Maybe Ministers like Jim Prentice will have an attack of conscience and organize Harper's ouster. Or resign in disgust. I doubt it, though.

  • OntarioTown

    Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive

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