StatsCan Angst

The media in the summer doldrums eagerly looks for stories that will convince their readers are important enough for them to become agitated about. What better way to accomplish that than to urge readers that something is dreadfully amiss under their very noses, and they will suffer when government implements some devilish new measures to impoverish their lives in one manner or another?

Eagerly sniffing about for opportunities to enlist the public in a campaign that the media trumpet as vital to the nation's future, enter the problem of a Conservative-led government emasculating one of Canada's proudest achievements: a numbers-crunching arm of government-at-a-respectful-remove whose results represent the pride of a nation.

Whose expertise is hallowed and valued as a measure of just how great this country is. As though the data that result from absorbing, correlating and combining statistics to provide neat little answers to all enquiries is a matter of national security. In fact, it is rather interesting that statistics of all kinds have been absorbed and tabulated and formatted.

Still, when political correctness intervenes and dictates to the process, it does have its defining limits. There have always existed queries seen as too sensitive to impose upon an unwilling public. Which have gradually managed to creep into the census, and no real harm done. Yet, responders have occasionally engaged in mischief in their responses.

And since the census is held to be obligatory by law, what rule of law has fallen upon these pranksters? So voluntary or involuntary is there a great difference? There are no guarantees either way, other than people for the most part are willing enough to engage in the process. Since most people under most circumstances are pleased to talk about themselves.

The new National Household Survey is being prepared for 2011. People will receive the survey and they will respond to it. Some eagerly, many others resentfully, and others yet with grim resignation. That speaks to the diversity of people and their inherent apprehensions. The Harper government has chosen to alter the process; the long form census will no longer be obligatory.

Hedging their bets, the long form will be sent to 30% of respondents rather than the former 20%. I wouldn't mind being a recipient; peculiarly I don't mind filling those things out; there's a kind of fascination in seeing the questions, never mind answering them. Which I would, in any event. But who would know, in either event, obligatory or not, whether I was responding honestly?

Yet because the government chose to make that decision unilaterally, even while suggesting they had queried Statistics Canada on the proposed change, the chief statistician felt such great umbrage at the slight to his authority that he chose to resign with honour rather than to maintain his professional accreditation as a public servant.

He'll be replaced. With someone less pridefully engaged on a personal level, perhaps more engaged on a public-spirited level as a professional head of a professional association. Of course if some level of statistics are now inadequately received, Statistics Canada has the option of collaborating with private industry who themselves regularly do quality polls relating to consumer dictates.

And even though the former chief statistician, Ivan Fellegi, decries what he feels is the interference of government in a hands-off industry of data collection for the country, fearing that the change will be deleterious to the department's ability to collect reliable data, he himself states a reasonable doubt:

"Since you can't check it most of the time, you either trust the provider or the information is kind of useless."

Precisely.