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.