Turning off the headlights in a snowstorm: the long form census
July 15, 2010 11:13 am Canadian PoliticsThe federal government’s decision to make voluntary the answering of the long form census is a major policy error in about five different ways. A decision so fundamentally wrong raised questions about the intelligence of our leadership.
The census is the basic instrument whereon depend a vast number of marketing, social policy, taxation, immigration, construction, business location and health policy questions. You cannot conduct government without adequate data on who lives where, how much money are they earning, what they own, how they get to work, whether they have work, and so forth. The Conservatives propose to suppress the rigorous gathering of data through the long form on spurious grounds of privacy. After the long form becomes a voluntary activity, virtually all data collected will become incomparable to previous, more rigorous data.
The mounting ignorance about the facts of our demography will make government a by-guess-and-by-golly affair. It is as if you turned off the instruments on an aircraft at night and tried to land by dead reckoning. Why would you want to turn off your headlights in a snowstorm?
Ivan Fellegi, the former Dominion Statistician, spoke about this the other day on radio. (You will have to endure the CBC for a few moments.)
His points were:
- The results will be biased because aboriginals, new immigrants, the poor, those with low educational attainment, and the very well off are less likely to respond. This will deprive Canada of important information about social trends such as income polarization. It will eliminate our best source of information about aboriginal Canadians, immigrants, and minority language groups.
- Municipalities and provinces will lose their main source of planning information for transportation systems, housing, and other local issues.
- The introduction of such a major change will disrupt any comparison from previous censuses, since it will be impossible to know whether a trend is real or simply an artifact of the switch to voluntary reporting.
- The change will deprive private polsters and researchers of the baseline data they use to check the validity of their samples, and adjust them to ensure they accurately reflect the Canadian population.
- The change means we will spend upwards of $100 million to gather unusable data.
I cannot imagine how the federal Cabinet could make so unbelievably, unspeakably stupid a decision. It is anarchistic in effect, if not in motive.
-no polling preceded it
-no consultations preceded it
-no thought preceded it.
The issue is not StatCan: as Fellegi says, it is the impact on the myriad users of this statistical information for every kind of business and governmental purpose.
Is their purpose the deliberate blinding of governments at all levels? Why would they think blinding government will make it less intrusive , less costly and more effective?
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Dalwhinnie
Kevin` :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 11:55 AM
Seeing as the data belongs to the individual citizens who are required to fill the forms out I see this as a step in the right direction. Threatening people with the big stick of government to reveal their personal data has never seemed right to me especially when they never seem to be able to properly secure it anyway.
The Grey lady :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 12:15 PM
The only question and I mean only question I answer is the number of poeple living in my home. The rest? They don’t need to know. As far as I am concern the rest is NOTFB.
wilson :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 12:24 PM
The Ottawa Citizen
May 31, 2010
Thousands of francophones across Canada are believed to have lied
about their ability to speak English in a seemingly co-ordinated
attempt to manipulate the 2006 Census in order to guarantee federal
funding of programs for francophones.
What’s that you say about the reliability of the cnesus information?
The census was scammed.
We have enough public institutions that can provide reliable info needed for provinces and municipalities (schools, hospitals, fed/prov agencies).
We have plenty of organizations that collect data, that is reliable, fact based and widely available ( provincial and national Real Estate boards; banks)
Besides, the census is under charter challenge right now,
time to dump the big brother government programs!!!
wilson :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 12:27 PM
p.s.
”..manipulate the 2006 Census in order to guarantee federal
funding of programs for francophones..”
I’m betting this is not the only scam out there manipulating the census to get ‘over funded’ by the Canadian taxpayer!
canadiansense :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 12:47 PM
If we have spent Billions on “social justice” since PET and according the bleeding hearts they are worse off today, why do we keep sinking good money after bad?
I suggest we demand more accountability regarding the existing money we already spend before we get distracted with another program supported by the Liberal media and retired civil servants.
Let me know when the Board of Internal Economy will release all the details and stop hiding their spending.
Rick :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 12:51 PM
I believe the census has only been mandatory since 1975. What press is reporting this? Don’t you see you are arguing for your fellow Canadians to be sent to jail for not revealing personal information to the government. You may feel it is fine to entrust your personal information to bureaucrats, but many Canadian do not (some are your friends and family). Why are you so intolerant of their views that you would have them jailed?
Lori :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 3:07 PM
Wow, how wrong can a conservative blogger be?
I have nothing to add to what has been said above.
Just shaking my head…
wilson :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 3:43 PM
Did you know the long form asks:
‘Permission to use income information from individual’s income tax file. Income from child benefits. Income tax paid’
So how do they know what income tax file to pull for information?
Name, address, SIN, birthdate?
25,000 are hired for the census,
YOU trust them all with info ripe for identity theft?
Maxwell Wolf :
Date: July 15, 2010 @ 7:35 PM
It is very common to see those without a technical background advocate a census. Statistical methods are sufficiently advanced that one doesn’t have to go around and count every single thing to derive at an answer with high degree of confidence. The proof for this is of course mathematical. In an age when a phrase such as “We are the ones we are waiting for” is the summit of logic all this is understandable.
datalibre.ca · Friday’s Census Media Round UP :
Date: July 16, 2010 @ 9:55 AM
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Friday’s Census Media Roundup from Datalibre.ca « CAPDU :
Date: July 16, 2010 @ 10:59 AM
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Friday’s Census Media Roundup from Datalibre.ca | KimberlySilk.com :
Date: July 16, 2010 @ 11:04 AM
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Frances :
Date: July 16, 2010 @ 1:05 PM
Dalwhinny – have you ever been stuck filling out the long form. I had to help a blind relative do so – what a pain!! Further, I quite agree with those who are concerned about identity theft; name, address, DOB, SIN, all on one handy form you just give to a temporary employee of Stats Can.
I’ve also had the misfortune of being stuck with Stats Can forms for a client whose industry is targetted. Again, they want a lot of info that takes digging into the accounts to produce. My policy is one hour max, and they get what I can figure out in that time (and this includes reading the durn thing to try to sort out just what is wanted). I refuse to bill my client for more time, and equally refuse to donate my time to the Gov’t. My volunteer time goes elsewhere.
Glendronach :
Date: July 17, 2010 @ 10:28 AM
This is but another of those sad occasions when the Tory blogosphere takes on the aspect of a barren echo chamber.
While commenters have railed against Big Government and invasion of privacy, they have done nothing to refute the arguments raised by Dr. Ivan Fellegi, the former Chief Statistician. Fellegi makes the sound case that census data is a valuable public good that benefits the economy and improves the efficacy of government planning.
Now, are die-hard conservatives going to tell us that it is evil to allow businesses to better tailor their products to the market or find the most efficient ways to expand? Or that we would be better off if governments planned and budgeted infrastructure spending without reliable information on community growth? Who would take seriously this blind triumph of ideological purity over common sense?
Some have argued that census completion is an intrusion into their lives. I ask them, would you be happier with a bloated tax bill thanks to the construction of superfluous infrastructure or the deterioration of your children’s education thanks to poorly projected plans for building schools?
The notion of public goods is not equal to socialism or communism. It is the poor execution of government that verges into those. By contrast, accurate census data can lead to more cost-effective government when public spending is applied to where it is actually required, based upon informed decisions.
The über-Tory crowd fails to take note that the opponents of the new census policy are not The Usual Suspects. The complaints are coming from those who drive the Canadian economy, rather than the rent-seeking crowd.
As for the Max Wolf point that censuses can be replaced by otehr market data, I challenge him to demonstrate how these other data sources could be as publicly available as that from the census, so that all Canadians could take advantage of it. Methodology is not the question, it is access.
Dalwhinnie :
Date: July 18, 2010 @ 7:19 AM
Thank you, Glendronach. This is an issue of science. It would be quite possible to reduce or amend the long form census queestions. Something might be lost by not knowing commuting times or the number of bathrooms, for instance, but the remaining data could be compared year over year to provide decision makers with tools to decide where best to place a factory, or whether to build an interchnage on mile 10 or mile 20 of some highway. To make the sample incommensurate from one year to the next, since henceforth every year will be a hodge podge of who answers and who does not, is to destroy most of the value of the long form questionnaire.
Most of the respondents to this article seem to me to miss the point about limited government. To be a conservative is to believe in limited government, agreed. Yet government should also be effective in addressing the collective action problems for which government was established.
Nothing brings government into disrepute faster than for it to be ineffective. This is the thrust of my critique of the Tories’ decision on the long form census.
For those who think it best for government to be ineffective, let them argue it explicitly.
Ray K. :
Date: July 19, 2010 @ 7:47 PM
“Nothing brings government into disrepute faster than for it to be ineffective.”
Seriously? How do you define effective?
blair atholl :
Date: July 19, 2010 @ 10:51 PM
This can only be considered a “mistake” at all if one believes that citizens will not freely participate to assist the government in its goals. Apparently the author, dutifully distrustfull of the judgement of the nation’s good citizens like a good bureaucrat should be, feels they cannot be trusted to honestly and willingly provide this information. Governments and their obsequious servants that do not trust the judgment of their citizens diminish the social capital required to sustain liberal democracy.
duggan's dew :
Date: July 20, 2010 @ 3:45 PM
Only in Canada, a vigorous midsummer debate about – the census? Hilarious. What can Mr. Harper be thinking? There is only one issue, and that is a Tory majority. I have no idea if the Maximum Leader is doing the right thing or not. I can only hope he is.
Dalwhinnie :
Date: July 21, 2010 @ 7:25 AM
“A good bureaucrat” !?
Blair Atholl, you slay me!
Dirigiste, perhaps.
Authoritarian, maybe.
But “bureaucrat”? Never!
Too routine and humdrum.
And I retsract nothing. Flying blind is too dangerous. Moreover, the federal government is being hypocritical when it moans about the invasion of privacy in statistics – which are jealously guarded by StatCan from every other prying department of government- and your every financial trasnaction is an open book to agencies under the Department of Finance.
duggan's dew :
Date: July 21, 2010 @ 7:53 AM
Indeed, in comparison with your financial institutions, Google and even Microsoft, the government knows almost nothing about us as individuals, and is legally constrained from sharing information between departments. This is an interesting conversation, both here around the Barrel and elsewhere in lesser media. What parts of ‘peace, order and good government’ require a firm statistical foundation and how is that foundation to be built? The government is coming under enormous pressure to maintain the long form. Can our Glorious Leader prevail? This is the stingiest Canadian government with information that this four-decade journalist has ever seen – perhaps the Supreme Commander believes that those who never give should never get?
blair atholl :
Date: July 22, 2010 @ 9:58 PM
Look – and to Glendronach as well – the issue isn’t one of having no data. The Americans went through this exercise some time ago (or so I understand) and their former stats czar was on Newsworld (God bless ‘em) today. The change from “do this or you may go to jail” to “please fill this out – it would be helpful to your country” produced a change in compliance from the mid-90%s to the low 90%s. According to this esteemed gentleman that meant that the privacy concern, which he deemed “very legitimate” in these areas creates two possible outcomes. One is that the bureau must work harder (which will cost more money) to gather the same information. The other will be that the quality of the information is degraded relative to the lower compliance rates. Given that the change in compliance is from, say 96% to 92%, it is difficult to see how that tradeoff constitutes the disaster that Dalwhinnie, Glendronach and the Globe and Mail editorial board foresee. When freedoms are limited, no matter how big or small, the burden of proof/justification for those restrictions falls entirely on the state. At least that is how democracies and other freedom-loving societies have traditionally defined themselves. The argument ventured by Dalwhinnie, Glendorach and the draft dodger collective that is the Globe and Mail newsroom implies that freedoms are granted at the convenience of the state – as if they are bon bons to be handed out from time to time when good little citizens have proven themselves worthy of enjoying them. Right-thinking people, on the other hand, understand that freedom belongs to the individual who may from time to time when convinced of its necessity, accept their restriction in order to serve the collective needs of society or the governments they choose to form to act on their behalf.
blair atholl :
Date: July 22, 2010 @ 10:00 PM
p.s. the knowledge that the details of my private life are “jealously guarded” by agents of the state somehow gives me little solace.
blair atholl :
Date: July 22, 2010 @ 11:43 PM
p.p.s. on Glendronach’s “Dr. Ivan Fellegi, the former Chief Statistician. Fellegi makes the sound case that census data is a valuable public good that benefits the economy and improves the efficacy of government planning.”
OF COOURSE Dr. Fellegi makes a sound case and of course census data is a valuable public good. But surely the Flying Fellegi’s of this world can somehow muster the courage and fortitude to get by with a 92% compliance rate as opposed to a 96% rate in exchange for not using the jackboot of the state. The bureaucracy’s sense of self-importance is breathtaking in its audacity.
duggan's dew :
Date: July 23, 2010 @ 8:27 AM
If last night’s family get-together was any indication, the census controversy has too many dimensions for a clear win and will not alter anyone’s political fortunes. There is, as always, a strong appeal in the ‘ignorant small-town Tories hate book learnin” argument, offset by ‘why are other countries dropping long forms?’ The ‘extremely high social value of the data’ argument is countered by ‘data should not be collected by threat of incarceration and is not trustworthy anyway’. So, as with other extremely boring topics, there is much to be said on either side, on the one hand this and on the other hand that, wouldn’t it be nice if we all got along, and so on.
Glendronach :
Date: July 23, 2010 @ 12:52 PM
It appears that the defenders of abandoning the long form census cannot hear the criticisms of the policy due to the whirring blade noise of the black helicopters.
Blair Atholl :
Date: July 24, 2010 @ 11:35 AM
Why do you defenders of the status quo insist on using misleading statements such as “abandoning the long form census?” The only thing changing here is that people are free to decline to fill it out. As the say in the newsrooms of the nation, though, “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
Brian :
Date: August 26, 2011 @ 2:41 PM
Frankly, you are wrong and/or misguided on so many levels that, to be brief (and avoid redundancy) I will mention only one (though it is so tempting to address the self-serving justifications offered by our Chief Statistician). Information involuntarily provided is useless information. There is no way to know what is true and what is fudged out of sheer bloodymindedness at the gall of gov’t forcing people to disclose private information. Voluntarily disclosed, data, on the other hand, has much greater reliability.
The Tories were right on this one. It’s too bad you don’t understand that.