Please see the Comment at bottom of this posting and my rebuttal. If that is insufficient, there are many postings on this blog about this issue.
OTTAWA – If Statistics Canada was surprised by the Conservatives before the last census, this time it was ready for the unexpected.
Stephen Harper’s government revealed it would kill the mandatory long-form questionnaire less than a year before the 2011 census was mailed out and two years after an election campaign where the topic never came up. The statistics agency scrambled to get a voluntary National Household Survey in place.
When the Liberals were sworn into office in November, one of their first orders of business was to announce the reinstatement of the long-form census.
The timeline seemed very tight — the first forms are to go out to residents in the North in February.
Good news if we are to have evidence-based decision making. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Sandra.
I strongly disagree, Rae.
The Government is building detailed files on citizens through censuses and surveys. We have a Charter Right to Privacy of Personal Information, and for a good reason. Witness the historical record.
Evidence-based decision-making is possible without the accumulation of all this personal information on individuals.
I will post my most recent communication (today) to the Government on this issue.
/Sandra
I’m also glad the long-form census is back, and am satisfied that the privacy of people from whom the information is collected is protected. Have we ever had any evidence that census information is being misused?
Hi Brian S,
I think I have responded before to your position which I do not share. Let me just add this:
What are the grounds upon which you satisfy yourself that the privacy of the personal information is protected? (Reassurances are not reliable grounds.)
But more fundamentally, why do you not value the Charter Right? And why do you dismiss the lessons of history?
If Stephen Harper taught me anything, it is the vulnerability of democratic principles. In a climate where environmentalists become terrorists, where First Nations are empowered to protect their lands, where the Government interest is the corporate interest – – I could add many more examples – – detailed files on citizens are key to the abuse of human rights.
The Right to Privacy of Personal Information is PROTECTION.
Read “IBM and the Holocaust” which is specifically about the enabling role of mechanized census files on the elimination of selected segments of the population in Germany. It was census data that enabled the rounding up of and removal of Japanese citizens at gunpoint in the USA. The phenomenon exists in the police states in today’s world. There is wisdom in the Charter Right.
Read George Orwell, “The Animal Farm” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Citizens FORGET why and how democracy works, to their peril.
I also do not understand why you ignore the reality of Lockheed Martin Corporation’s involvement at StatsCan and its connection to the NSA. And with that the revelations by Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, which we knew anyway, about American surveillance, including back-door (illegal) entry to data bases.
A small amount of reading will inform Canadians about the appalling extremes to which the American Government goes in order to ensure access by its Corporations to the resources of other countries. They are ruthless.
You are free to believe whatever you want about the data base on Canadians at StatsCan, and to act accordingly.
I will defend Charter Rights to the end, including the Charter Right to Privacy of Personal Information. It is a fundamental safeguard in a democracy – it’s not hard to see how those detailed files on citizens can be abused, and so should never be allowed. It’s too late, after the fact.
The statement of our Charter Right to Privacy of Personal Information is compellingly stated:
“In fostering the underlying values of dignity, integrity and autonomy, it is fitting that s. 8 of the Charter should seek to protect a biographical core of personal information which individuals in a free and democratic society would wish to maintain and control from dissemination to the state.”