The census debate really does reflect the silly season of politics:
http://tinyurl.com/37vme9c
“We’re there to represent the population and we don’t want the state to interfere in the private affairs. The Liberals, they want the state thinking about the personal life of Canadians,” Conservative MP Maxime Bernier said in an interview Sunday.
The Conservatives are trying to turn a debate over census data and information – that many experts say is vital to community planning – into a stark stand-off over the government’s right to collect information.
3 comments:
They almost or did push their base away with the deficit spending. So now they help win back their base with this issue and they don't lose any votes because no one else really cares. Smart politics on their part ... I hope we don't play into it too much.
The forced collection of this information may be unconstitutional. This is not trivial. How many black kids I have in my house is.
The bid to quietly change the mandatory requirement might have been a way to deal with that problem. Now, the cat is out of the bag.
I believe that excellent data can be collected from voluntary compliance. Polling firms do this all the time.
LJ above is probably right. I suspect that it appeals to their base but they may have the courts on their side as well.
On the one hand, threatening people into answering surveys is wildly unethical. On the other hand, it's not like the Conservatives know anything about how the census work. They're not going to give Statistics Canada the millions of dollars needed to hand the survey out door to door and protect the data's quality.
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