{"id":115,"date":"2015-09-30T05:03:55","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T05:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/catsforharper.ca\/?p=115"},"modified":"2015-09-30T05:03:55","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T05:03:55","slug":"the-long-form-census","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"The long form census"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many years ago, I became one of the lucky recipients of the\u00a0“long form” census from Statistics Canada. When I read\u00a0through the 20-some pages of questions, I became concerned: there were too many questions of a personal nature, and I did not feel that my anonymity was adequately protected by the census procedure. My concern was fueled, in part, by the fact that I just finished reading Edwyn Black’s book, IBM and the Holocaust<\/em>, which detailed how the Nazi state used census information collected by way of IBM tabulating machines to quickly locate and round up Jews in occupied territories.<\/p>\n

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Indeed, I became sufficiently worried that I wrote\u00a0a letter,\u00a0addressed to the then Chief Statistician, Ivan Fellegi, expressing my concerns. Much to my surprise, I received a phone call a few days later from a senior employee at Statistics Canada, who politely listened to my concerns and seemed genuinely interested.<\/p>\n

I was hoping for some reform that might alleviate my concerns. Never did I dream that one day, Canada will have a government that will\u00a0disastrously undermine the statistical integrity of Canada’s census by replacing the mandatory long from census with a voluntary variety.<\/p>\n

This is one of several acts of this government that show \u00a0the depths of their scientific illiteracy and indeed, their hostility to proper science. And the damage is lasting; even if a future government restores the mandatory long form census, valuable and important data have been lost for good.<\/p>\n

A government that shows such contempt towards scientific integrity does not deserve to govern. Perhaps minding cats is a more appropriate vocation for Mr. Harper and his colleagues.<\/p>\n\"1\"1\"1\"1\"1\"1\"1\"1\"1 (average: 7.00<\/strong> cats out of 9<\/em>)
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Many years ago, I became one of the lucky recipients of the\u00a0“long form” census from Statistics Canada. When I read\u00a0through the 20-some pages of questions, I became concerned: there were too many questions of a personal nature, and I did not feel that my anonymity was adequately protected by the census procedure. My concern was … Continue reading The long form census<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cats.vttoth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}