Tagged: Tony Clement
Letter of resignation
The libertarian devotion to individual freedom that led the Harper Government to kill Statistic Canada’s mandatory long form census questionnaire apparently did not extend to the Chief Statistician of Canada’s letter of resignation.
Munir A. Sheikh posted a note about his resignation on the agency’s website late Wednesday night. The Harper Libertarians redacted it Thursday morning, replacing it with an uninformative generic message.
Here, for the record, thanks to Kady O’Malley, is the full text of the Chief Statistician’s censored message to Canadians:
July 21, 2010
OTTAWA — There has been considerable discussion in the media regarding the 2011 Census of Population. There has also been commentary on the advice that Statistics Canada and I gave the government on this subject.
I cannot reveal and comment on this advice because this information is protected under the law. However, the government can make this information public if it so wishes.
I have always honoured my oath and responsibilities as a public servant as well as those specific to the Statistics Act.
I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.
It can not.
Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister. I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity of serving him as the Chief Statistician of Canada, heading an agency that is a symbol of pride for our country.
To you, the men and women of Statistics Canada – thank you for giving me your full support and your dedication in serving Canadians. Without your contribution, day in and day out, in producing data of the highest quality, Canada would not have this institution that is our pride.
I also want to thank Canadians. We do remember, every single day, that it is because of you providing us with your information, we can function as a statistical agency. I am attaching an earlier message that I sent to Canadians in this regard. In closing, I wish the best to my successor. I promise not to comment on how he/she should do the job. I do sincerely hope that my successor’s professionalism will help run this great organization while defending its reputation.
Munir A. Sheikh
Harper’s Reformers vandalize the census
In an interview with CBC Radio’s Jim Brown, Ivan Fellegi, who served as Canada’s Chief Statistician from 1985 to 2008, set forth five ill-effects of the Harper Government’s surprise decision to make a crucial part of the 2011 census voluntary.
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.
Derek Cook, research and social planner for the city of Calgary, adds a sixth: In previous census years, the long form was sent to carefully selected households in each community, producing invaluable planning information at the neighbourhood level. Making the long form voluntary will render this neighborhood data unusable. Says Cook:
If we don’t have that data at the neighbourhood level, we’re crippled…. How do we assess the need for affordable housing if we have no reliable low-income data to base our affordable housing plans on?
The Harper government responds to these problems with specious arguments. Industry Minister Tony Clement says some people found questions about the number of bedrooms in a household or the length or travel to work intrusive, but provides no data. Canada’s Privacy Commissioner says the 2006 census produced a total of two complaints to that office, and an investigation determined that the long form did not offend the country’s stringent privacy laws.
The government says an increase in the number of households receiving the long forms will compensate for its voluntary nature, thus betraying its ignorance of the science underlying statistical sampling. Increasing the size of an unrepresentative sample does not correct its failure to reflect the population being sampled. Randomness is paramount. Voluntary samples, no matter how big, are not random.
The surprise change is a move right out of the US Republican Party playbook: If you don’t count poor people, poor people won’t count. The same holds for minorities.
Mark this as one of those revealing episodes in Stephen Harper’s minority tenure when the carefully tended curtain slips and we catch a fleeting glimpse of the Oz-dwelling figure at the controls. Like the mean-spirited mini-budget tabled and then abandoned in the fall of 2008 under threat of an opposition coalition, it’s a hint of how the Reformers will change Canada if we’re ever incautious enough to give them a majority.
