Yesterday, May 10, was Census Day, the deadline for the completion of the 2016 Canadian census. This year marks the reintroduction of the mandatory long form census, which was made voluntary by the Harper government in 2010. Failure to complete the census could lead you to be fined, imprisoned or both.
This move has been celebrated by many in the mainstream media and on social media, with numerous triumphant cries hailing the return to “evidence based policies.”
This struck me as odd. Since when did giving the government personal and private information become cool? In the age of Snowden, the NSA, and Bill C-51, isn’t handing over piles of information to the government something we’re supposed to protest and be scared of?
Bill C-51 was an overhaul of Canada’s anti-terrorism laws and was met with vehement opposition.
One of the biggest criticisms of C-51 had to do with privacy concerns. Opponents feared the prospect of the government collecting personal data like their internet browsing history or travel habits, and sharing it between different departments of government.
Yet many of these same individuals welcome the return of the long form census. What could possibly explain this apparent contradiction?
The easy explanation is partisan bias. Bill C-51 was a product of the “evil, anti-democratic” Conservative government led by Stephen Harper who is either “Hitler, like Hitler, or worse than Hitler” depending on which Harper-hater you asked.
However, the return of the mandatory census was, of course, the product of the “enlightened, data-loving, evidence-based-policy, quantum-computing expert” Justin Trudeau’s government. I guess as long as the government has a friendly face leading it, its collection of personal and private information is perfectly acceptable.
This cognitive dissonance brings to mind government plans to ban menthol cigarettes, in order to keep them out of the hands of children, while simultaneously working to legalize marijuana…. in order to keep it out of the hands of children. It seems that sound and consistent logic is too much to ask for in government policy.
Cognitive dissonance, inconsistency, and disingenuousness in public policy debates, regardless of which political camp it emanates from, is aggravating to say the least; it would be nice to see less of it in the future.
C-51 would affect far less individuals, I doubt C-51 would have targeted people for no reason. I don’t expect the gov. has that kind of time to waste, or I didn’t until boy Trudeau got in. Now I see the potential for abuse with renewed eyes.
But it is strange the leftie nutbars are willing to hand over all their personal information to the government yet opposed C-51. Someone said one in ten Canadians are handed the long form census. That is a lot of personal files started every 5 years, some new, some with new information to add to an existing file. Personal files on a huge number of Canadians.
The long form census is much more intrusive than the C-51 if C-51 were used as it was meant to be.
Maryann, U.S.-based Lockheed Martin provides services to the Canadian government to analyze census data. Why, is a good question I don’t have the answer for.
Harper did NOT do away with the long form census!
All Harper did was to remove the penalty for not filling it out.
All the Liberals have done is to make it illegal to not fill it out.
The Liberals believe that forcing people to fill out the form will produce accurate results.
The Conservatives believe that allowing people to voluntarily fill out the census will produce more accurate results.
Common sense and logic clearly indicate the Conservative are correct and the Liberals are idiots.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Canada is a donor to the IMF, not a borrower. You might want to learn a little more about macroeconomics from some source other than a conspiracy blog.
I understand the government needs some information for an efficient distribution of services however I object to some of the questions as I see them of no real value in organizing services and more of a personal info grab on individuals. They are compiling files on people. I don’t like it. Its intrusive, unnecessarily intrusive and I fail to see how some of those questions facilitate anything. It is an intrusion of my Charter Rights. If someone wants to know if I’m sleeping with someone,how many rooms in my house or, how much I would estimate my property is worth, or any of the other personal questions they ask, they had better be my mother so I can tell them to go jump in the lake.
Why do they need to know who answers those questions, if the questions are answered, a name tied to them should be irrelevant.
To be a loyal Conservative you have to buy the nonsense much like the Liberals and the NDP. The fact is the Conservative party wants control on law and order, the environment for energy projects, sending people overseas. It seems to me that the Conservatives are very selective in their libertarianism when in fact they do not believe in libertarianism at all because much of their policies are globalist, social conservative and libertarianism is used as a campaign marker rather than being in the forefront. The Liberals with their marijuana issue have shown that the Conservative party is in the past on such a pro-libertarian stance which the Libertarian party would be deeply in support of. The Conservative party for the most part is not even for decriminalization or any recreational drugs.
It seems to me that the social conservative wing of the party wants law and order to be the main focus of the party with foreign policy being the second and tax cuts being the third with energy with a focus only on oil issues. With that narrow-minded focus, it appears that the Conservative party is very much a partisan party which is stuck in its ways and does not even want a middle ground on any of these issues and the issue at hand is really about balance rather than the right wing conservatism which does not want moderation at all.
That is truly what this debate should be about rather than control which all parties if you think about it have their own segments of control when Lilley is being disingenuous about control on other issues which I would say the energy issues matter even more to people’s lives than just the census. Harper and his party when they were in power ignored the natives and just wanted to ram through the pipelines when there should be consultation. I am by no means a massively pro-environmentalist, but I believe in balance for most issues.
I can understand why the Conservative party may want to not have ways of finding out where people truly stand and using accurate data because they want to end the “Social Contract”, which is something that people should be aware of. The Conservative party is a populist right wing party. They will only give their supporters red meat bait to satisfy them and to hell with the consequences, but for a society to run well we need balance and we need real policies that can help the people in the middle and the bottom first and foremost.
Conservative supporters also do not realize that people that are poor for the most part did not end up there by their choosing. They ended up there because Canada does not make anything anymore. People think that hard work guarantees that you will end up at the top. Well, no it does not. People all the time work hard and play by the rules. There are not enough jobs to go around. You look at people applying for jobs nowadays there are tons of people just applying for a single job. When governments show unemployment numbers they never take into account those that have fallen off the unemployment benefits and those that have stopped looking for work. This is a phenomenon which successive Liberal and Conservative governments have used to make employment numbers seem a lot better. Even the 1.3 million jobs done by the Conservatives is pretty suspect because that was not verified.
Which is why Canada needs mechanisms and independent officers of parliament to truly conduct these measures and to take the power out of the hands of the political parties so that they can be kept accountable and transparent as they claim to be doing, which anyone that has watched parliament knows exactly that the three major parties only care about power and not about accountability, transparency and openness. That is why Canadians need for services to be run well a census and other mechanisms as well.
Do not suppose that it is more complicated. The census is very well formulated.
No-one has ever been put in prison for not filling out the census. The hope is that Canadian citizens will fill out the census truthfully because they want to be heard and they want accurate information to be available.
How did you like the questions? Were they fair?
If the census were truly confidential you wouldn’t have to give over identifying information. I would gladly give them accurate, indepth information if it were truly confidential, as in my name and exact local excluded. I wouldn’t mind being identified as a citizen of area x, but that is all the identifying info they should ask for. As it stands it is an infringement of my rights to privacy from government.
Liberals are for one thing and one thing only. and that is their Liberal Party.
Liberals put their Party ahead of their country, or even their ideals, on every occasion, without exception.
Yes, I think that is the best way to put it.
1) they know that accurate information about the population is important. How many people actually live in this town? Do they speak French or English at home? etc.
2) People want their own voice heard. I am living “common-law”, or, “the first language I learned was…” etc.
For this sort of basic information people want to be counted in. Everybody knows that no-one has actually been thrown in prison for refusing to answer. A mandatory census gives us the facts.
From the old detective show: “just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.”