The Commons: Sound economic theory

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 8:01 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Michael Ignatieff stood to relate the concerns of another individual he’d recently met—the latest in his 33-million-part series on the lives of average Canadians. “Mr. Speaker, on Monday, at Our Lady of Lourdes High School in Guelph, a young student named Diane asked me a question,” he recalled.

Across the way, various Conservatives groaned. But the Liberal leader would not be troubling anyone on the government side to respond to Diane’s question. In fact, he had already answered for them.

“‘We’re caring for my grandmother at home. If elected, what would you do to help people for caring for the sick and elderly at home?’” Mr. Ignatieff reported this young lady as having wondered. “I replied to Diane, ‘Our answer is the family care plan.’ The Conservatives’ answer is, ‘Use your vacation time.’”

No doubt the Conservatives appreciated that Mr. Ignatieff had saved them the trouble of telling Diane that much themselves.

“The question is this,” Mr. Ignatieff continued, now seemingly speaking for himself. “How can the Prime Minister justify tax breaks for profitable corporations instead of helping families like Diane’s?” Continue…

Happy World Statistics Day

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Statistics Canada sets out what it expects from the voluntary census.

Statistics Canada also said the estimated response rate means the NHS is likely to have a sampling error that is “slightly higher (worse) than would have been achieved from a mandatory long-form census,” and certain subpopulation groups “are particularly at risk” of seeing fluctuations in the error rate.

More worrisome, however, is the non-response bias, which can skew survey results. According to the federal agency, the risk of non-response bias in a survey goes up as the response rate goes down. ”This is because, in general, non-respondents tend to have characteristics that are different than those of the respondents and thus the results are not representative of the true population,” Statistics Canada says on its website. “Given that the National Household Survey is anticipated to achieve a response rate of only 50 per cent, there is a substantial risk of non-response bias.”

We have everything to fear but fear itself

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

CP/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCK/ PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

Some leaders rule with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. Stephen Harper rules with the mask from the Scream movies.

Like many Canadians, I love being terrified of people and issues—it’s way easier than making the effort to understand them. But Harper wants us to be afraid of so much stuff that it can be hard to keep track. Here’s a useful primer of things the PM wants us to fear:

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'Once again, sir, is your government TOTALLY crazy?'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 12:37 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Press obtains census-related e-mails sent to the Prime Minister’s Office during the last week of July.

A Canadian Press analysis shows more than four-fifths of 293 email messages to Stephen Harper during a single week last summer were critical of the change. Seven per cent supported the government’s move, three per cent were neutral and nine per cent expressed no clear opinion…

Several who sent emails took issue with the notion the mandatory form was intrusive, calling the privacy argument a “bogeyman” and “balderdash.” ”I am a lifelong Conservative, a loyal and generous supporter and one of your staunchest advocates … with extensive training in statistics and research methodology, I cannot understand why our Conservative government would decide to make elements of the census voluntary,” wrote one dismayed correspondent.

Some worried it would prevent Harper’s team from ever winning a majority in Parliament. ”You are losing sight of the big picture,” wrote one.

'Once and for all'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

Maxime Bernier has released a statement intended to clear up any census-related confusion. It reads as follows.

I would like once and for all to set things straight with regard to the many reports that have appeared recently in the media regarding my position on the census.

First of all, the CBC has obtained some internal correspondence through an access-to-information request saying that Industry Canada and Statistics Canada only received a few hundred emails of complaint related to the census in 2006. Some commentators have concluded that this was proof that I had been lying when I claimed to have received about a thousand a day for a couple of days.

But I had clearly indicated when I made this declaration back in July that these emails had been received at my MP office on the Hill and not at my minister’s office. It was a discussion with my MP office staff that had led us to recall receiving these emails. Contrary to the correspondence received by the ministry, which is kept by civil servants, the email correspondence at my MP office has all been deleted.

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Who's on first?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Maxime Bernier maintains he received a thousand e-mails per day when he was Industry Minister, but he can’t say for sure how many of those pertained to the long-form census. But that’s besides the point anyway because the change to the census was about the principle.

Statistics Canada says it received 138 complaints about the content of the 2006 census, but if that seems a small number, Industry Minister Tony Clement reminds that anyone worried about state coercion obviously wouldn’t take their complaint to the state. But that’s beside the point anyway because even one complaint can be enough.

And indeed, on that count, Mr. Clement has a record of one such complaint: a letter sent by a Liberal MP in 2006 registering the concerns of a few of his constituents. But then that Liberal MP has a copy of Mr. Bernier’s response, in which the former industry minister assures that ”information collected by the census is needed and is used only for statistical purposes,” that “questions are designed to meet important information requirements that would be extremely difficult to satisfy efficiently from other sources” and that “these questions continue to be essential for providing the information needed by governments, businesses, researchers and individual Canadians to shed light on issues of concern to all of us—employment, education, training, transportation, housing, immigration, income support, pensions for seniors, transfer payments, aboriginal issues and many more.”

Census appeal hits dead end in Federal Court

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 3:49 PM - 0 Comments

The Federal Court won’t be hearing a Francophone group’s last-ditch appeal to save the long-form census after all. Judge Richard Boivin turned down the Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities’ petition for a judicial review, saying there was nothing in the government’s decision that violates the Official Languages Act. But while the court was siding with the government, a new poll shows many Canadians would like to see the Conservatives reverse course on the census. The Angus Reid survey found 49 per cent of Canadians think the government should re-instate the mandatory long-form census, while 29 per cent said it should stick to scrapping it.

Toronto Star

Politics big-city elites, you say. Sound familiar at all?

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Caronna/Reuters

When government House leader John Baird claimed last week that Toronto-based “elites” were behind the push to save the long-gun registry, it had the desired result: Baird was loudly mocked all the way from Front Street to Eglinton Avenue, which pretty much proved his point. But it also marked the final transition of the federal Conservatives into an intellectual branch plant of the Republican party of the United States.

The storyline of the summer was the emergence of the federal Conservatives as a party committed to principled ignorance. Whatever the issue—crime, climate change, the census—the government has made it a point of pride to actively ignore facts, research, and expert opinion. Baird’s crack about “elites” is part of a strategy that believes there is little to be gained in politics by having good ideas and implementing evidence-based policies. Instead, the key to success is being able to control the meanings of words used in political discourse.

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The Commons: Treated like children, no more

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 7:01 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Shortly after Question Period began this afternoon, the Prime Minister rose and, without warning, announced a dramatic change in the direction of the country.

“We will treat the public like adults,” he vowed. “That is how we are going to conduct business in this country.”

He did not immediately clarify how this change will be implemented—a shift of this magnitude requiring nothing less than a completely new understanding of national governance and the public space. Nor did he say when he expects this edict to take effect.

Presumably, no matter how committed Mr. Harper is to this idea, it will have to wait until after the debate on the census has subsided. Continue…

Standing up to imagined tyranny

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday’s House debate on the census starts here. The following is the first government interjection and the response from Liberal Marc Garneau.

Mr. Steven Blaney (Lévis—Bellechasse, CPC):  Madam Speaker, I have a question for the member from Westmount—Ville-Marie. I was very interested in what he had to say, and one word in particular struck me, the word “ridiculous” . I am sure that the member opposite will agree with me when I say that it is ridiculous to put honest citizens in jail for refusing to say how many bedrooms they have in their houses or even what kind of cereal they eat in the morning. That is the issue before the House. How can we collect useful data without infringing on individual freedoms? I would like to know whether the hon. member is ready to work with the government, as he has done in the past. Two questions have been added to the short form to collect information for validation purposes, information that will be useful to all Canadians. Is he ready to propose real solutions and to acknowledge that society and individual freedoms have evolved?

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The race to save the census

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 27, 2010 at 11:31 AM - 0 Comments

The Liberal opposition says it will move a motion this week calling on the government to reinstate the long-form census and remove the threat of imprisonment for non-compliance. Even if passed by the House, that motion does not compel the government to act.

That motion though will be followed, in short order, by a Liberal private member’s bill, which would, conceivably, be official and binding. With the support of the NDP and BQ, that bill could, to some degree, be accelerated, though it’s unclear precisely how fast it could be moved through the House and when it could be expected to see a final vote.

Timing is, of course, of the essence because the census and the National Household Survey are due to be sent out in May. Liberal Marc Garneau mused late last week that perhaps an insert could be included advising recipients that the NHS is mandatory. Ivan Fellegi, the former chief statistician, has suggested that the whole census could be moved to September.

The Commons: Picking up wherever it was we left off

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 6:40 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. It will no doubt shock you to learn that there remain profound disagreements between the major political parties as to the future direction and management of the country. What’s more, it seems still that when the members of these parties are placed in close proximity and offered the opportunity to speak publicly, they regularly refer to each other in loud tones and critical terms.

Thankfully, everyone is agreed that something should be done to make things somehow better. If only everyone else would agree to act differently than they do.

And thankfully, for however long we wait for this conundrum to resolve itself, there will still apparently be Tony Clement to amuse us. Continue…

Another elite special interest

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 17, 2010 at 10:31 AM - 0 Comments

The Governor of the Bank of Canada explains to the Globe how changes to the long form census will impact the bank’s work.

Mr. Carney told The Globe and Mail editorial board on Thursday that those changes could have an impact on the quality of research in those important areas and force the bank to supplement the information with its own research. “There is a non-trivial range of data that could be affected,” Mr. Carney said…

When asked which data could be affected, Mr. Carney said, “that’s part of what we’re going to have to work through. Obviously a series of surveys on the household side, and the potential implications for the labour force survey … there could be issues around the productivity data, some of the other national accounts, and then you get into more granular data … some of our longer-term research could be affected.”

The present and future of the census

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Gordon points to four essays on the census from the current issue of Canadian Public Policy. Separately, he himself takes on the idea that a voluntary census will provide more truthful responses.

It is possible that individual files will have fewer errors if the census is voluntary, but these gains look to be small and – in the absence of empirical evidence – mainly hypothetical. In contrast, the losses associated with self-selection bias are large and well-documented. If the government wishes to pursue this idea, then it should be field-tested before making it a basis for policy.

But the main reason why I am skeptical of claims that a voluntary survey will yield more ‘honest’ results is the way the government has handled the file. After a summer of mockery and dismissiveness, the government and its supporters have created a significant constituency that now believes that the census is a tool of its political opponents. We’re going to get the worst of both worlds: a census with a biased sample and a higher rate of inaccurate responses.

When ministers of the crown tweet

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 12:22 PM - 0 Comments

Whatever the result of his last adventure in this regard, Industry Minister Tony Clement endeavours once more to engage the Internet.

dgardner David Frum takes “impartial” stock of the war on terror and concludes … he was right about pretty much everything. http://bit.ly/91kut9

TonyClement_MP @dgardner David Frum’s analysis seems spot on to me. Level-headed for someone under attack 9yrs ago today. Why so snarky?

dgardner @TonyClement_MP : I agree with some of it. What bugs me is seeing someone use his abundant intelligence to rationalize away any ...

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Now with more sampling error

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 11:31 AM - 0 Comments

The Globe gets hold of the internal survey conducted to test how a voluntary census would perform.

Statscan researchers found the voluntary approach produced less accurate results – a problem that was especially significant in small population groups, according to outside statistics advisers who reviewed the report for The Globe … the real 2006 long-form census found that visible minorities as a share of the population increased by 2.77 percentage points between 2006 and 2001. The simulated voluntary approach would have reported an increase of only 0.74 percentage points.

Something more effective

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 1:04 PM - 0 Comments

Ken Boessenkool, a former advisor to Stephen Harper, and economist Jack Mintz take up the census debate in search of something somehow better.

Recently, the U.S. dropped its every-five-year long-form census in favour of annual surveys to provide up-to-date information for policy analysis. European governments are using various databases to improve analysis without requiring long census forms that are collected only once every five or 10 years.

For all these reasons, the debate over the mandatory long-form census is overdue and seeking a replacement is timely. If anything, the government should create a task force to look at new ways of collecting information that would serve Canadians better and provide more data for evidence-based public policy.

As has been noted, moving to the sort of system used in some European countries would raise other concerns about the privacy of citizens. As for the United States, it has indeed replaced its decennial (once every ten years) long-form census with an ongoing “American Community Survey.” Here is a copy of the 2010 ACS. You’ll perhaps notice that it includes 48 area of inquiry, including some of the same questions Messrs Bossenkool and Mintz lament as needlessly invasive in the Canadian context. The ACS is also mandatory. Those who willfully neglect to participate are potentially subject to a fine of as much as $5,000 (ten times the maximum for not filling out the census in Canada).

Toward a total ban on analogy in political rhetoric (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

The policy director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association explains why aggregating government data to replace the census would be unfortunate for the basic principle of individual privacy.

The government has said that in addition to the new voluntary National Household Survey, it will rely on existing databases to paint a picture of the Canadian population, but Vonn said that approach is far more worrying than the long-form census.

Citizens’ privacy relies on data in government and private databases existing in silos, she said, but linking them will “create de-facto citizen dossiers that are a privacy Chornobyl waiting to happen.”

On the one hand, the measure outlined here could conceivably lead to a disastrous breakdown—a meltdown, if you will—of citizen privacy whereby a large amount of information is inadvertently released or abused.

On the other hand, in the case of the actual Chernobyl, several dozen people were killed and several thousand were poisoned, while a large area in Ukraine was rendered uninhabitable.

Toward a total ban on analogy in political rhetoric

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 10:39 AM - 0 Comments

From last week’s hearings of the industry committee, the former chief executive officer of the Saskatchewan regional health authority tries to draw a straight line from torture to the census.

“What you can guarantee by compulsion is a response: You put a gun to somebody’s head, they’re going to say something,” Mr. McFarlane told the House of Commons industry committee.

“It’s almost like the argument for water boarding: if you water board enough people, they will tell you something,” Mr. McFarlane said. “The question is are they telling you something that’s reliable? Are they telling you something that’s usable?”

Of course, since torture is abhorrent, law enforcement agencies in most civilized nations must acquire their answers through interrogation and investigation, aided by tools such as subpoenas and search warrants. So perhaps Statistics Canada could be assigned its own police force, with the same powers, charged with acquiring the demographic information it requires.

Or we could all agree here and now that analogies, when discussing contested political or social issues, are almost always misused and should therefore be almost always avoided.

The census show trials

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:46 PM - 0 Comments

The industry committee is in the midst of another day of hearings on the census—you can view the proceedings online here. CP and the Globe have filed early dispatches. The Globe’s Steve Chase is also keeping a running account.

If you’d tuned in a moment ago, you would have noticed that among the witnesses was Calgary talk radio host Dave Rutherford. And if you’re wondering why a talk radio show host would be called before a parliamentary committee to testify on the census, you are apparently not alone. This from Mr. Rutherford’s own Twitter feed.

Hey the politicians must be desparate. I have been “invited” to appear at the Industry Committee in Ottawa about the census long form. Why?

Her Majesty enacts as follows

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 12:17 PM - 0 Comments

The Liberals have set out legislation they will propose when Parliament returns next month that would be effectively enshrine a mandatory long-form census. The full text of the proposed bill is here. The Statistics Act would also be amended to eliminate the threat of prison for non-compliance.

"Worthless trash. Stop Wasting our time."

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Gordon, a Quebec university professor (“What a surprise. End of comment,” writes one commenter), tries to demonstrate how the mandatory long-form census has often been a tool for demonstrating the futility of large interventionist government schemes. His commentary appears on the National Post website, where it is read by National Post readers, and hijinx ensue in the comment boards.

The census: power, knowledge, and role-reversal

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Gordon put up a (deservedly) well-circulated post today in which he debunks the emerging consensus (agreed to by both the left and the right) that sabotaging the LF census is part of a “right wing” strategy at sabotaging the welfare state, and that the LF census is something that the left should naturally support. “This a puzzling argument”, he writes, because “Before the census became an issue, the Left, not the Right, was the more determined opponent of evidence-based policy analysis.” And he goes on to list a number of key policies where this was the case.

The post reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write on since this started, about how the current left wing opposition to the government’s census decision is not just politically tactical (as Gordon argues). It is also marks a bit of an ideological shift , in that it reverses, or at least ignores, the traditional opposition from the left to the state’s power to coerce and control the population through the  development of statistics and the systematic collection of information.

For you theory geeks out there, I’m just talking about the old Foucaultian power/knowledge stuff. Lots of you are probably familiar with his famous discussion of Bentham’s panopticon, but the key for Foucault is that the panopticon was in many ways just a metaphor for the surveillance society, one where the state’s ability to collect and synthesize information about individuals gave rise to what he called the “carceral continuum”: what connects the maximum security prison, the insane asylum, the education system, and our domestic arrangements is that they are all part of a common surveillance society where we are subject to categorization and the application of official norms of behaviour.

One of the most important figures of the last few decades on this stuff is the UofT philosopher Ian Hacking, who has done a tremendous amount of work, inspired by Foucault, on the development of statistics, the classification of people, and the way those classifications are used to sometimes help or change people, but most often to control them.  One of Hacking’s great contributions was his idea of the “looping effect” — where people internalize the norms and values of the categories into which they are slotted, to the extent to which the act of categorization actually creates the very type of person it purports to be “measuring.”

When I was a grad student at UofT (over a decade ago now, yoiks),  many of my fellow students were beavering away under Hacking’s supervision on projects that were a form of philosophical sociology: they were applying Hacking’s analytic schemes to various common social types (one was the “Jamaican criminal”, I think another student was looking at the very idea of “the battered wife”). These projects were invariably a form of advocacy academia, in that they were aimed at promoting a distinctly left-wing political agenda.

For these long-ago colleagues of mine, it was axiomatic that the state was largely in hock to totalitarian corporate interests. The only reason the state would want to gather the sort of information that is collected in the long-form census would be to protect those interests by giving it the tools of power-knowledge that would allow it to categorize and thereby control the population.

So what does this mean? For starters, I think it suggests that the current opposition by the left to the government over the census decision is largely tactical. But this doesn’t mean the left is being hypocritical, not at all: I think it involves a very welcome abandonment by the left its long-standing hostility to the liberal state. Finally, I think it involves a concession that statistical information is not inherently politically biased — that what matters is how it is gathered, under what circumstances, and for what purposes.

Ultimately, the LF census has to be defended on its own merits — what policies or programs will it serve, and do these themselves serve the public interest. Stephen Gordon is right: framing the debate in terms of left versus right only obscures what is really at stake.

The other list

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 2:27 PM - 0 Comments

Last week there appeared here an unofficial tally of those organizations and officials who oppose the government’s decision to do away with the mandatory long-form census. Several more expressions of concern have since been noted.

Here then, in the interests of fairness, is the list of organizations and officials who have expressed support for the government’s decision. Continue…