Statisticians as a group have always kind of flown under the radar, perceived as boring number-crunchers even geekier than accountants who are constantly going on about confidence intervals and accuracy within plus or minus three percentage points.
That is, until the Tory government dropped its inexplicable bombshell decision this month to abolish the mandatory long-form census in favour of a voluntary version.
The public outcry over this move, fuelled in large part by the angry resignation of the head of StatsCan, has all of a sudden made the statistician into a folk hero, a lone crusader for level-headed facts in the face of a government that seems to think that listening to the people is, well, voluntary.
Kevin Liban in the National Post hits the nail on the head on the Harper government’s failures:
But after four and half years of governing Canada, the Prime Minister still doesn’t know how, or maybe, care to, go through the tactful political efforts it takes to win friends and influence people. This is, and appears destined to remain, his weakness, believes Tom Flanagan, the University of Calgary political scientist and Mr. Harper’s former chief of staff and organizer. There was the sudden, surprise announcement to cancel taxpayer funding to parties — which almost brought down the government; the sudden, surprise announcement to cancel subsidies to Quebec artists, that may have cost him a majority government; the sudden, surprise announcement to prorogue Parliament. All without warning; all without consultation; all without properly preparing the ground in advance with notice, persuasion and rationale.
In this case, the government doesn’t seem to have any rationale – at least not any rationale that makes sense or that stands up to the smallest amount of scrutiny. And this decision, which comes out of nowhere and will have ramifications for years to come, has made us a laughingstock in the world and has sparked angry protests from all sides of the political spectrum.
It’s not even a budgetary move. The government wants to send out an additional 10,000 forms to compensate for less people filling them out. In addition to clearly never having taken a statistics class, Tony Clement must have failed basic arithmetic, because sending out all those extra forms will cost more money, not less.
Here are links to an online petition and a Facebook page that have set up to protest the Harper government’s decision.
And, for the West Wing fans, see Sam explain the (U.S.) census to CJ in a classic episode here:
Update 8/4: The new census policy is being challenged in court:
A French-Canadian group has launched a legal attack on multiple fronts against the federal government’s move to scrap the mandatory long-form census.The group has not only asked Federal Court to void the Harper government’s new policy, but also wants an injunction that would keep the new type of census from being distributed this year.
It is also asking the court to fast-track its case so that it can be heard by mid-October, before the government distributes the 2011 census.
I can't decide whether this was a Machiavellian plot to make the census data useless and irrelevant so the Conservatives would no longer have inconvenient data about political and social needs they disagree with, or whether this was simply gross incompetence on the same level as that bank robber who thought that rubbing lemon juice on his face would make himself invisible to CCTV cameras.