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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."
Oh, yes - making policy and decisions based on evidence as opposed to ideology - wild indeed. I'm buckled in tightly with a 5 point harness; I'm ready for this ride.
Ian Ameline
I think he is referring to the legal requirement to tell the government everything they want to know. But maybe not. I don't really know what's on the Canadian long form. If it is like the US it is mostly bunch of stuff the government already has access to (like income), but are too lazy to go get, and a bunch of stupid stuff like how many bathrooms are in your house.
Pretty much.
It's also annoying as shit to fill out, being the typical longass-form government documents.
"Response rates are lower among certain groups, including immigrant populations, aboriginals, and low-income families."
The people too busy working and trying to make ends meet to spend a few hours reminding the government there's brown people with muslim names living at 2211 youfuckersalreadyknewallthis, Ottawa, appartment 404.
Making it mandatory or else face criminal charges, is simply ridiculous.
It may be extreme, but how else do you encourage people to fill it in. Heck, this only happens every five years?
It is a pain to fill in, but if it means understanding the needs of the general population better, then I am for it. Sure they will be bad data, such as when people just make things up, but every statistical process has some error margin.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And may the gap in data go down in history as the "Stephen Harper knowledge gap"
No, their plan actually calls for making evidence based policy instead of simply deciding what they want the facts to be.
You know, collect information and use it to make decisions, instead of just making decisions based on ideology which has nothing to do with reality.
But, hey, go live in your mountain cabin and continue to believe this stupid crap.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yes, because government is all about doing things for groups of people instead of the country as a whole.
Let there be no part of your life secret so the government can do for you. Just stop them before they take that next step and decide all you can do.
Pay for it.
Depending on height of reward, that would either achieve nothing, or skew results towards low-income households. Since those would be more likely to take the money (vs. richer people who'd say "f** that, I've got more important things to do").
So, basically, you're against census even existing. Because the alternative is no census at all. A non-mandatory census is an absurdity.
There's nothing like $HOME
A census can only be mandatory. If its not mandatory, its a survey. Requiring residents to complete a census of their households is hardly onerous. At no time has anyone ever faced a fine or spent time in jail for failing to complete the census. There is a penalty, because under law you cannot have an action declared mandatory without a statement of penalty for failing to comply. A sign of good things to come. A return to rational, science and evidence based decision making. Not basing policy on unsupported beliefs and ideology.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
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.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
The US long form asks about mental/emotionial issues you may have, how much money you make and how, about your commute, how old your house is and what appliances you have
The long form is just being restored. It was started in 1971 so it's not new. From http://voices-voix.ca/en/facts...
"The mandatory long-form census was implemented in 1971. Since that time, the census has been comprised of two census forms: a short form and a long form. The short-census includes 8 questions and probes basic household composition information. The long-form census includes an additional 53 questions, probing respondents on a variety of demographic, social, and economic subjects, including things like citizenship and immigration status, ethnic origin, religion, place of birth of parents, education, income and housing, child care and support payments, labour market activities, and unpaid/household work. This data is used to plan public programs and projects such as equalization payments, Employment Insurance benefits, the Old Age Security program, and the Canada Pension Plan. The data also has an impact on public transit and transportation infrastructure, health-care infrastructure, social services, and education.
The short form is sent to 100% of Canadians and is mandatory. Until 2010, the long-form was mandatory, and was sent to 1 in 5 Canadians, with the data extrapolated to the rest of the population. While it was mandatory, the response rate for the long-form census was approximately 94%, producing data from a non-biased sample of the population and serving as one of the most important planning tools in Canada. Because this data is considered representative, data from the mandatory long-form census has been used as an “anchor”, reducing the risk of bias in other StatsCan surveys.
Because of its breadth and high-response rate, the mandatory long-form census has been one of the most reliable data sources in Canada. Reliable statistical information about all parts of society also supports government decisions to fight poverty and reduce the marginalization of disadvantaged groups. Measuring equality requires good, long-term and repeated data in order to determine if we are making progress. Without it, we simply don’t know."
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.
I don't have particular objections to the long form census, especially as I doubt they will come after you if you don't fill out all the questions, or answer erroneously (although considering the data is used for planning though this wouldn't necessarily seem to be in ones best interest).
However, it makes me worry that this is being presented as 'open and fair government'. I was really hoping Trudeau's campaign for 'real change' would include dropping the political blowing smoke up asses and not making every decision part of a heroic effort for 'open and fair government.'
You know, collect information and use it to make decisions
...Or just this decade (because no doubt, we don't do that anymore, amirite?), Uzbeks or Syrian Christians or Rohingya or Bodos or Burmese Muslims... Do I really need to go on?
Unfortunately, world history has a looong list of countries using such information "to make decisions" about how best to deal with Jews or Cossacks or Indians or Armenians or Japanese or Kurds or Sikhs or... I could go on, but you probably get the point.
But, hey, go live in your mountain cabin and continue to believe this stupid crap.
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help" has counted as the most terrifying phrase in the English language for centuries for a damned good reason. This doesn't require a tinfoil hat or a manifesto or a cabin in the woods; it requires nothing more than opening any major newspaper, turning on the evening news, listening to the morning news during your commute to work, skimming the headlines at Google News - To know why giving the government anything more than they absolutely need to perform their core functions, counts as a bad idea.
Or put another way - If my race, income, or education level has any impact on how many roads I get in my county, the government has already fucked up so badly we need them gone ASAP.
The UK one is here: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guid...
Broadly, it's
- who lives here, and how are they related?
- how big is the house, and is it owned or rented?
- what is your age, ethnicity, education, origin, religion?
- are you healthy, do you have a job and what kind?
- how do you travel to work?
They don't ask for income, or any identity numbers.
Knowing how many bathrooms are in the house is useful for planning water usage, and tracking poverty or overcrowding (no / shared bathroom).
Take your tinfoil hats off already. I work for a civic agency where my primary role is to provide the decision makers with the right data necessary to make informed decisions. We, along with many other branches that serve the community, were severely handcuffed when Harper removed the long form and made the short form voluntary. The data is often used to help identify where focus and resources are best placed so that the taxpayers we serve get the most bang for their buck. Believe it or not, many public servants do understand who pays the bills.
The onerous nature of the questions lead to massive violations of privacy. NO citizen of any country should ever be compelled by force of law to reveal the private information of their lives. The government has ZERO right to know anything beyond the fact that I am alive and paying my taxes per the law. They don't need to know my skin color, my religion, what I do for a living, etc, etc.
The information they want to gather will only lead to the further degradation of the privacy of the citizens.
Bearded Dragon
And yet the asshole who preceded him spent years trying to "fix" a criminal court/prison system that had all forms of crime rates decreasing for years.
Most of us want the government we have to do better with the money they are given from us. This means making rational, well-thought out, science supported decisions. To do this, one needs good data. Statistics Canada were world renowned experts in this, and yet the previous government decided they were irrelevant to their decision making.
The previous government made all sort of criminal justice policy decisions with very long term repercussions WITHOUT any evidence to support this "Canada is better with tougher sentences" position.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Evidence would be good. Compelling people by threat of force to give evidence is not.
And it degrades the quality of the evidence. "I'm from the government. How often do you use illegal drugs? If you don't answer you're going to jail. If you say yes it goes on a permanent record that the next administration might use against you. Ah, you never use them? Thanks for the valuable sociological data, citizen.
There are ways to gather sociological data that don't involve threatening people. Give me an anonymous survey, maybe a cash incentive for filling it out.
Don't know Canada's laws but the U.S. census gets nothing from me but a number; the feds are constitutionally empowered to conduct an enumeration for purposes of allocating representatives, not to forcibly pry into my life to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies.
If you don't think this is important, ask a Japanese-American who was put in a concentration camp in the 1940s. Once the state has your data, it is not private; it can always change the rules.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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 ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The same Conservatives who passed Bill 51 to spy on all citizens and directly gather the information? Yes they really must love their privacy to vote in the most anti-privacy government in Canadian history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Equality (in this sort of sense) is not a legitimate governmental purpose.
Maybe not in the US. But in Canada, the purpose of a government is whatever Canadians decide it should be, and if most of us think the government should help marginalized and disadvantaged groups, then that is by definition a legitimate governmental purpose.
The census is important.
What are the big complaints with all social science data?
They are nearly all subject to selection biases; many are self-selecting and/or opt-in, etc. And the sample sizes are usually quite small.
This is pretty much the only source of data that is taken from the population selected at random, is mandatory, and the sample size is massive. Its good data.
Its taken once every 5 years, but only affects around 20% of the population. My household has never even been selected. Growing up my parents received it only once that I know of. It is not a "huge burdern".
Very little of the data collected is qualifies as 'secret' or 'personal'. Here it is; see for yourself.
http://www12.statcan.ca/nhs-en...
Very little of it is objectionable; who lives in the house hold, how are they all related to each other, what is their level of education, where do they work/what do they do, where are they from.
The objections stem from:
Religion. Well there are no questions about religion on this one at all. None nada zero zip.
Sex: The only questions on sex are gender; and if you happen to self identify yourself as a same-sex spouse in the relationships. I suppose some transgendered individual who has decided to identify as neither male nor female might object to having to pick one. That's hardly a valid reason to argue against the census though.
Medical: There are some medical questions that some might object to. Difficulty seeing? hearing? walking? slow learning? long term health problem? These are extremely vague and generic; and are clearly useful for allocating and planning health services and very basic health trends.
Race / Language: There's some questions asking one to identify people's origin. (where they were born in canada or internationally, ethnicity, etc.) first nations status, immigration status, etc.
There are some legitimate historical cases where this last was used to persecute. But realistically, if we're going to round people up from country X for concentration camps, we'll be able manage that just fine without the census. Immigration records, and birth certificates to id them and their descendents, then tax forms and drivers licenses to find them will catch them anyway; throw in a neighborhood informant program.
Meanwhile the census data provides a good clear picture of the countries changing demographics that has a lot of legitimate uses.
So gather data via surveys.
Disclosing private information to the state is onerous. Especially when that data may later be misused if a later government decides to change policy. (Japanese Americans who told the feds their details in the 1940s thought their data was protected by law. Then the feds changed the law. Haw haw.)
So it's not actually mandatory. So people who don't want to complete it can trash it with no consequences. So it's a volunatry survey. You support the state lying? Saying "we'll put you in jail if you don't fill out this paperwork!" and then not doing it?
Your position seems self-contradictory. "We have to compel people to give us their data or else we won't have accurate data![*] But if we put people in jail for not giving us their data people will get upset and overturn that law. So we can't really compel people to give us their data. Se we can't get accurate data. And that's a return to rational, science and evidence based decision making." ([*] I don'r accept that, I'm trying to summarize what I read your position to be.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood