Canada Reinstates Mandatory Census, To Delight of Social Scientists (sciencemag.org)

Eloking writes with news that the government of Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be reinstating the mandatory long-form census that the outgoing government had ended. Science reports: "The new Canadian government today announced it would restore the country's mandatory long-form census. 'Our plan for open and fair government starts today with restoring the long-form census,' said Navdeep Bains, minister of innovation, science and economic development, speaking in Ottawa alongside Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of families, children and social development. 'We're focused on good evidence-based policies.' Bains said that Statistics Canada would be able to meet the 2 May deadline to roll out the 2016 census, which is conducted every 5 years, and that there would be no additional costs to making it mandatory. He confirmed that residents who fail to fill out the census could face criminal prosecution, an issue that contributed to the decision by the Harper government to make the 2011 census voluntary."

Comments

Re:The farther left you go, the more you lose

[Anonymous Coward]

Nailed it!

I had to fill that bastard out once.. it just goes on and on. Some of the questions at least make sense, but when it wants you to count how many closets you have in your house and indicate if you're a descendent of Genghis Khan and how much time per week you spend doing the dishes it gets old fast.

Response rates are lower among certain groups, including immigrant populations, aboriginals, and low-income families.

Also folks who tend to be a bit more paranoid about the man, with or without good reason.

Re:The farther left you go, the more you lose

[Punko]

I guess you're mixing up our previous hard right conservative government who basically ended evidence-based decision making. Its our centralist government we now have that is returning to the use of science, technical experts, and read data to make policy.

a paper crime

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a criminal if you don't fill out a piece of paper.

yet this fucking asshole wants to "rehabilitate" repeat offenders of serious crimes instead of giving them longer jail terms.

trudeau is fucked in the head. so is his entire libtard party.

A sample of the actual 61-question census

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

A sample of the actual 61-question census can be found here:
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imd...

It's 40 pages of fill in the square with nitpicky crap like "so what DID you do at your job as a COMPUTER EN-GINEER." That's 40 pages per person. No wonder Canadians hate it.

Re:A sample of the actual 61-question census

[jiriw]

Ehmm RTFF much?... It's 40 pages to fill in per 5 persons (if more than 5 persons live on the same address, you have to call in for a supplemental form). Which would make it about 8 pages per person. Roughly half of the questions should be skipped for persons aged below 15 and most questions are either 'mark the box' or writing names or amounts. It's not like you have to write a 40 page essay.... Questions are about:

-Inquiring the number of persons residential at the dwelling (the form gives detailed information about who to include and who not).
-Some basic information about each of these persons (Name, DoB, sex, marital status and relationships).
-Ethnic background of each person and language capabilities, detailed.
-Level of education and the type and amount of labour performed by each person over 15. Includes voluntary and unpaid labour (like household chores).
-The state and ownership situation of the dwelling the form is sent to.

Oh, and there is a page for comments.

Except for that last page, everything in the form seems to me to be very relevant for government decision making. At least, and I am generalizing here, if I'm well enough informed about what 'usual Canadians' consider proper government decision making. I'm Dutch, so I do not know the details, but I do read about what's going on in other countries than my own and that includes what populations usually expect from their governments.
Then, again, I can understand why some questions on that form would be highly objectionable to 'usual U.S. Americans'. And I might be wrong but most comments I see here are not those of Canadians... The impression I usually get from the U.S. is that you don't like to let your government meddle in affairs like basic health care, integration of minorities, housing regulations, public welfare or anything that touches income (taxes, minimum wage). And that's what many questions in that census are about. So, I'm not surprised I see so many negative comments here...

War on Science and Data

[kbahey]

Just a backgrounder ...

For the past 9+ years in Canada, we had a Conservative government (right wing ideologues).

They wanted to eliminate inconvenient truths that are against their ideologies, so they started a war on data and a war on science.

Here is a recent TV program explaining how despicable this is:

War on Data

War on Science

The new liberal government promised evidence based policies. One thing they promised is to reinstate the long form census which the Conservatives axed on false premises back in 2010.

So this is just undoing the damage done by right wingers ...

Re:The farther left you go, the more you lose

[dryeo]

The NDP (our Socialist Party) did not win this election, which is a shame as they're the most Libertarian Canadian political party.
The Liberals are the Centrist Party. Fun fact, they balanced the budget 8 times in a row before the Conservatives ran up the biggest deficit in Canadian history and finally managed to balance the budget for the election. The Liberals were also the only party this election who ran on a platform of deficit spending to fix infrastructure, much like a household will borrow money if needed to fix the roof.