Mike Lake is going to "astro-turf" support

The parliamentary secretary to truth-challenged Industry Minister Tony Clement has decided that hearing from, what is now becoming, an endless list of organizations opposing Harper's ditching of the census long-form questionnaire would, well, make things a tad uncomfortable.

So he's going to call his own witnesses to committee.

The Conservatives are proposing a new tack in the debate over the government’s decision to make Canada’s long form census a voluntary exercise.

Faced with a list of groups that so far tilts heavily toward the “bad idea” camp, Tory MPs say they will be calling individuals as committee witnesses to speak out in favour of the government’s plans.

“I think it’s appropriate to have individual Canadians appear,” said Edmonton-area Conservative MP Mike Lake, the parliamentary secretary to Industry Minister Tony Clement. “They’re the ones that are getting asked the questions and being forced under threat of fines and jail time to answer them, so absolutely it’s appropriate for individual Canadians to appear before committee.”

And once again, another Harperite reaches for the hyperbole of "jail time", something which no resident of this country has ever endured with respect to the census. Ever.

“There are over 200 groups that have protested against what the government is doing,” Liberal MP Marc Garneau said. “Obviously the Conservatives are trying to stall and they don’t have that many witnesses to begin with.”

The Tories said the opposition was proposing a timeline that was not realistic. They suggested instead that meetings be called a couple of weeks from now to allow witnesses enough time to prepare what they want to say.

Opposition MPs counter that groups opposed to the government move are chomping at the bit to speak before a committee. All three opposition parties accuse the Tories of stalling because they are struggling to find groups that will speak out in their favour.

Not so, Mr. Lake counters. There will be groups on their side – as well as individual citizens.

Groups? He means Reform think-tanks. Individual citizens?

“In terms of discussions that I’ve had with my constituents, Canadians across the country are split on this issue and certainly there are a lot of Canadians – I’m not going to get into what the witness list might look like exactly – but there are Canadians from coast to coast who want to comment on it,” he said.

Oh? Well unless it's a list selected from a random pile of telephone books by blindfolded Chimpanzees with highlighters we can all pretty much guess where the "individuals" will be coming from.

More at Scott's, POGGE, M.J.'s and Shiner's.

Apparently we the public are "annoying" to Steve now

“They don’t bother us. It’s just that they are annoying,”
a "senior Conservative official" told the G&M's Dear Jane this morning about the public uproar in reaction to the scrapping of the compulsory long-form census.
"Census freedom," this same anonymous Conbot amusingly called it.

Apparently we the public are annoying to Steve now.

And not just the Lib/NDP/Green/I-don't-fucking-vote-for-any-of-those-bastards public either.
Not even Con voters support Steve's "Après moi, le déluge" style of government.

According to Angus Reid, only 31% of people who voted Con last time "side with the government's argument that the long form census is intrusive", while 53% of previous Con voters "believe that the long form census yields data that is important to make policy decisions in all areas of public service, and should remain mandatory."

Jane's column header today is Clement digs in heels and gains a supporter on census
The "supporter" turns out to be a rightwing radiohead.
Ok ... that's one.
I dunno, Jane, I don't think you're helping here.

Over the weekend Feschuk took the piss out of Jane's many columns consisting almost entirely of quotes from anonymous "seniory super-inside long-time party whatever" Con sources. Lols.

For a decent column on actual facts regarding the census : the incomparable Zerb.

Harper is "inappropriate"

Steve thinks it is "inappropriate" to require Canadians to fill out a once-in-a-decade questionnaire to get a snapshot of what makes this a country.

"I know some people think the appropriate way to deal with that is through prosecuting those individuals with fines and jail terms," he said. "This government will not do that."

How... "liberal" of him.

How much more horseshit do we have to tolerate from his handlers? That line has Dimitri Soudas written all over it.

Harper would have your bank account number, your tax records and, if he could find a way to get it, the number of time you had sex in a week.

Here are a few of the things Harper thinks are appropriate:

1. Attacking the leader of HM Loyal Opposition in nationally televised advertisements when there is no election writ drawn up by the Governor General;

2. Locking the doors to Parliament when his slender grasp on political power is threatened by the whisper of a democratic option;

3. Contempt of the will of the people by ignoring the demands of a majority of the voters' elected representatives;

4. Passing off spurious motions in Parliament as "private member's" bills which are in fact nothing less than the agenda of a core of his caucus.

Just a few of the hundreds of things Harper thinks are appropriate in a democracy, every single one of them intended to save his political skin.

Harper doesn't know, nor it seems, understand Canadians. Nor does he understand citizenship. Somehow he missed that (similar to missing his Canadian Forces experience) in high school.

I've done the long-form census. It's a real pain in the ass. When the census taker came for a visit and had a talk with me about it I was more than reassured. No threat was ever issued. Guarantees, however, were very much in the forefront. As were the explanations and the reasons. And, just so we're all clear here, the point that I could identify with any group within a reasonable level of accuracy as I wished. Therefore, if I wanted to state that I was a Jedi Knight, that was entirely my decision. I told Statistics Canada that I worshiped the gods of the House of the Junii... and only occasionally. Look it up. You'll find it, and you won't find my name.

I also know what it takes to have a national identity and that's where Harper is well off the rails.

He has created an artificial condition with the expectation that it will generate a vacuum that he will fill by exploiting our Canadian sense of privacy.

How Timmy's of him.

I can brew my own 2nd rate coffee, thank you very much.

At some point we all have to pay a price for being able to state proudly, "I am Canadian". Simply providing an accurate tax return is not enough. There comes a time when we have the right to ask each other, with the expectation of a reasonable answer, how we live and what we are doing to support each other.

Harper, who loudly sings the praises of those who surrender their personal privacy, is now saying it's a bad thing. The reason he's doing it has nothing to do with your sense of privacy. It has to do with creating an illusion. He has oft been known to tell us that those who swore an oath to the Crown and wore the uniform are the best of this country... as though we didn't already know their worth. But in stating it, he diminished all others.

Funny thing. I was aware that I had a calling and an obligation to this country that might have been more obvious on the face of it, but I never, not for a moment, thought I was a better Canadian. Not ever.

Now, Harper is trying to create an illusion. It is the big lie.

You will submit to having your body searched in Canadian airports - for security reasons. If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide.

You will produce a photo ID on demand - for security reasons. If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide.

If secret government operations decide you are a threat... to unnamed things... you will be permanently affixed on any number of lists which prevent you from getting on aircraft, ferries, buses and on and on and on.

Do they get the information from a long-form census?

No. They can't.

So, Harper can wax on about how "inappropriate" it is to ask citizens how they live until he is blue in the face. The truth is, he doesn't give a red rats ass about whether your private life is secure or not. He has the agency power to bore in, questionnaire or no questionnaire.

Nobody has ever been jailed for not filling in a long-form census. But this Canadian has bought a pair of kids with Canadian flags sewn to their backpacks a lunch in Germany because we enjoyed a like identity. We shared the belief in community. We shared a trust that our government, democratic to the core, also believed in that. That whatever sacrifices we had to make to keep it alive were small compared to the reward we enjoyed for simply being Canadian. That, no matter what happened, no matter where we were in the world, that enormous homeland, with a thousand diversities made us kin.

Harper would like to kill that by making a questionnaire an artificial bogeyman.

Time's up!

The Harper government was given five days back on July 27th to produce documents supporting their claim that the census long-form was so intrusive to have caused a tidal wave of complaints by Canadians.

They have failed to produce.

Eliminate weekends, a stat holiday and add a couple of days for Harper-hillbilly factor and midnight last night (Muskoka time) would have been the double-double fudged deadline.

We have been handed... squat.

Buckdog leads us to this editorial which says the Harper Conservatives are arrogant. Indeed, they are, but it's actually worse than that.

The arrogance of the Tories, we are now seeing more clearly, is little more than bluster to cover the fact that they are truly lacking when it comes to governing. Harper knows that without tight control over anything said in the media, they will very quickly be revealed as bumpkins.

That's right and we've been pointing out that oft missed characteristic for quite some time now.

Tony Clement, devoid of any actual evidence of any of his prior claims, takes a leap into the bizarre defending his Dear Leader's pillaging of national census collection by suggesting that the information is just too good and actually having a law compelling people to provide it made the Conservatives feel like... the government.

“Hey, listen, they had a good deal going,” he [Clement] added. “They got good, quality data and the government of Canada was the heavy.”

Pick up that jaw, citizen. What Clement just told you is that the information from the census long-form was quality stuff. He's also being economical with the truth because he was attempting to tell you that anybody who wanted the washed data was getting it for free. Not so, as provided by Pogge:

Ah. So StatsCan has been providing "good, quality data" all along. Thanks for admitting it. Now you can wear it. And since Brian Mulroney's day, it's the federal government that has had a good deal going by being able to charge the rest of us for the data it should have been gathering anyway.

That's right. The Mulroney "user fee" doctrine which made your taxes nothing more than a membership fee in a club with a sales kiosk. The only people getting census information for free is the federal government. Everybody else has to cough up cash.

As David Eaves points out, every level of government relies heavily on accurate data produced by the census. Data which, by Clement's own admission, was accurate and reliable.

Clement has further suggested that the varying layers of government can get their data by paying private firms to gather it for them.

“All these provincial governments and these social institutions and private businesses – we’ll get them some data that will be useful and reliable,” he said. “If they don't want to use that data, it's up to them. They can pay for it another way. … You don't have to rely on the government of Canada.”

All these provincial governments?! Is that disdain we read? What Clement hasn't told you is that the federal government too will have to go out and buy the information. You'll be paying for that and you can rest assured they will not be sharing anything they get. And there will be no guarantee of reliability beyond the kind of error factor we see in polling data. For example, think of how many times you toss consumer surveys in the garbage after buying an item.

Aside from being worse liars than most governments, these clowns really are unfit to govern.

"Pirates didn't bury their treasure that carefully"

Heather Scoffield and Jennifer Ditchburn lay out the litany of lies propelled on the country by the Harper Conservatives over the census long form and underscore a simple fact:

From the PMO to the Treasury Board, with Harper controlling the entire process, everyone in government political circles was very aware of how wrong the decision was and how much irreparable damage would be done. Otherwise they would have no need to bury the evidence their handiwork.

They behave like criminals, hiding behind lies, inventing stories and attempting to divert attention from their actions.

Then they send in the greatest fabricator of all - Stockwell Day. Having called a press conference to discuss his party's "Economic Action Plan", Day found himself ambushed by reporters who are increasingly aware that when a Harper cabinet minister speaks to the census decision, a lie will be issued forth.

There is a simple point here: If the Harper government truly believes that what they are doing is correct and that the Canadian public agrees, they would not have to employ odious characters like Dimitri Soudas to invent outrageous scenarios of home-invading census workers; they would not have to send senior members of cabinet out into the public armed with easily rebutted falsehoods and; they wouldn't have to resort to the likes of Stockwell Day, (an individual who is truth-challenged at the best of times), to babble on idiotically, spewing bovine scatology on virtually any subject he is presented.

The Treasury Board President also faced questions about the Conservative government’s commitment to cutting the deficit while spending billions of dollars on new prisons while the crime rate is, in fact, declining.

Mr. Day doesn’t buy the view that crime rates are declining. Rather, he maintains crime is going unreported in Canada at “alarming” rates.

Based on what?!! The statement was so ludicrous that it got up the nose of Sun Media's (a Harper friendly organ) David Aikin, who decided it was time to put Day's claim to the test.

“I will follow up on that because I am baffled,” Sun Media’s Ottawa bureau chief David Akin said. “There is a statistic about unreported crimes? I mean if they are not reported by definition we have no idea about these crimes.

“You are just not making sense or I may be just a dolt and I don’t understand. Help me out on this one.”

Which pushed Day further into the pile of manure he had just dumped on the lectern.

In response, Mr. Day made vague comments about bankcard theft, fraud, home invasions and identity theft. And he promised to send Mr. Akin some statistics.

We'll be watching closely to see where and how those "statistics" were acquired. But more importantly, I'm calling absolute bullshit on Day right now. Does he really believe that someone who has suffered a bankcard theft would leave that unreported? Would you let a home invasion go without reporting it to the police? Identity theft is a massive unreported crime?

Is Day right out of his mind?!

A police investigator acquaintance told me recently that Harper's crew regularly exhibit all the signs of a criminal trying to evade justice and that if he had someone like Day, alone in an interview room for 30 minutes, he would have him confessing the truth and crying for his Mommy. They're that bad at covering their tracks.

Boom! Both barrels. Chief Statistican quits.

From Stats Canada, Munir A. Sheikh former Chief Statistician of Canada:

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.

That makes Tony Clement a verified liar.

Hat tip Boris.

Who'da thought this could get so ugly

Apparently not the Harper reformers. Given that it's tough to get over one-half the eligible voters out for an election because they're just plain not interested or engaged enough, relegating something like a census form to the round file on the deck probably looked like nothing more than weekly desk clearing.

Surprise.

The head of Statistics Canada says he's "reflecting" on his future at the agency, the latest twist in the crisis over the government's decision to scrub the mandatory long-form census.

Once again, it makes one wonder what type of "economist" Harper is supposed to be. Economists live and die by statistics. It's the bread of the bread & butter combo. Without accurate statistics economists are hard-pressed to produce reliable forecasts of anything and most economists I've met want more statistics - not less.

The truth is, the Harper decision to scrap the compulsory long form is more than telling as to how he intends to govern in the future. The Conservatives may not want to know what the make up of social, ethnic and economic groups are in this country, but they're quite happy to pry deeply and grossly abuse their secret authority to track your financial behaviour. Go read what Dan Gardner has to say about it. Then take a flip over to Scott's for more.

It's becoming more and more obvious that this whole thing is ideologically driven with a view to scrapping anything they don't like and to drive minority groups as far out to the margins as they can. In Harper's democracy, if you are not squarely in his camp, you are an enemy and every effort will be made to neutralize you.

Finally, click on over to Cathie's where she picked up a fantastic summation offered by a commenter at Warren Kinsella's site.

So, why don't they want a comprehensive cesus?

Let's face it. The census is a pain in the ass. It's not like filling in the boxes on a tedious income tax T1 because at the end of it there isn't even a faint hope of a monetary refund.

We don't like it because it's boring. And, as we start to fill it out, it seems to get into aspects of our lives we would rather not discuss publicly.

Except that it's never public. You will never be revealed. You become a statistical factor; Anonymous beyond any level you could imagine.

So, why wouldn't a government want those statistics? Easy.

Every so often you are asked to wake from the bliss of your Canadian existence and physically present yourself at a polling place. There you are asked to select the person you think would best represent your life desires, wishes, pipe dreams, etc. You expect them to report back to you what they've done. With the pencil provided, you exercise supreme power by making an X in a little circle.

That X represents a huge power. You have a part in determining who will manage this country on your behalf. That includes the use of the money you send as an investment into the continued running of this country.

You expect, and are entitled to know, exactly how that money is spent. You expect and are entitled to know, what laws are passed which affect the entire community, known as a country.

When the government you helped choose opts to spend some of the money you sent to promote that community you expect them to justify that expenditure. Likewise, when that government decides to remove funding from some aspect of the community, you expect them to articulate their reasons for doing so based on some solid evidence. The census comes to mind.

The only reason a government would choose to eliminate the statistical record of the country is so they can, with a bald face, tell you, the person with the power of the X, that there is no statistical evidence to support the things they do not ideologically support.

Thus, government becomes less transparent, less accountable and much less responsible to the person holding the ballot box pencil. You have to accept their ideology because you have nothing in terms of official statistics to defend your position.

In short, your vote and the power it carries, becomes worth a whole lot less. And a government, instead of having to defend its direction, tells you that there is nothing to prevent them from pursuing their ideology.

We used to call them Trotskyites. Now, we just call it Harper's democracy.

Bonus! Chet gives a different and very important analysis.

I am now watching for three wise men approaching from the east

Jeffery Simpson wrote this?

Last fall, Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided his government would oppose the mandatory long-form census. Since then, nothing has changed his mind. His right-wing ideology and political instinct combined to make a policy that’s being denounced by almost every leading institution and commentator in Canada.

His decision was also opposed inside the government by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and by Industry Minister Tony Clement, who’s responsible for Statistics Canada, the agency that administers the census.

Both wrote to the Prime Minister, underscoring the importance of the mandatory long-form census to compile the most accurate statistics on which so much public policy and private-sector decision-making depends. The issue went back and forth inside the government, but, as with everything in Mr. Harper’s Ottawa, the Prime Minister decides.

His is a government in which most ministers are reduced to silence, except for those kept on short leashes, and in which everything, down to astonishingly small details, are decided by the Prime Minister, and only by him. His mind can be changed, but only occasionally and usually only after the passage of time between his initial decision and a new one. In this instance, despite internal discussion, his initial decision has stuck.

Wow!

I have rare moments when I actually agree with any pundit, let alone Jeffery Simpson, but Jeebus H on a Popsicle stick, he nailed that one.

Finally.

Question? (Hopefully, Jeffery can assist with the answer.) Why are Flaherty and Clement still in cabinet? Shouldn't they resign as a matter of protocol? We do still have conventions of leadership in government, do we not? If a minister is opposed to the decision of cabinet do they still enjoy the confidence of the prime minister?

Or, is it different with an uber-right-wing government?