Keep in mind that all the Conservatives want to do is decriminalize the Federal census.
Which will have the effect of making government *and* the private-sector organizations using that information less efficient, more expensive, and more error-prone.
It is a purely Libertarian move.
While they're at it, why don't they drop the requirement for a drivers license to operate a vehicle on the roads?
Why on earth should we use the authorities to harass and threaten our citizens over a census.
At tax payer expense no less.
Why do we harass our kids go to school?
At tax payer expense no less.
And a very, very important point to be made here is future governments can include or delete any questions they see fit.
Just like it can school curricula.
It means you should pay attention to questions on the census and point out ones that are truly inappropriate, just like you should be paying attention to your kid's school curricula.
Is the census asking if you've ever had sex with aliens?
So the Federal government is using taxpayer moneys to collect census data at gunpoint.
Do you have this same attitude about Jury duty?
They then sell off the data to the private sector for a profit or give the data to research groups who then sell anything discovered of value to the private sector.
Well gee, isn't that a horrible thing to do.
MOST of the time the data is used by government at all levels (federal, provincial and municipal) to simply govern effectively. After that, the next greatest users are affiliates, like colleges, universities, cancer research facilities, etc. etc.
But the government is nice enough to make data available to the private sector so that Canadian business can compete more effectively in a global market, and you think that's a *problem*?
Sure they sell it to the corporations at cost, but that's business, and I'd advocate making it available for free to Canadian corporations, but they've already had their taxes cut so past the point that any sensible person like Paul Martin - who'd already cut corporate taxes as much as any sensible person not operating on a secret agenda ever would - so if they don't want to pay for the service through their taxes, then they can pay for it over the counter if that's how they want to play.
And the corps are *still* getting the info cheaper than if they had to go fish for it themselves!
Besides, selling the information (to appropriate clients) reduces the cost of taking the census, which means lower taxes.
In effect your taxes are being used to enforce data collection which could then be used to create a more potent cigarette or a more marketable haemorrhoid cream.
Ooo that's scary... a society that helps its business sector. They're such bad people, we should never let our business people have any competitive edge.
Now lets talk about the indigenous peoples.
The old if we don't have an enforceable census then they become underrepresented.
I really don't buy that.
Why? You're friends with natives, and they all tell you that it's frustrating that they have only a one-in-five chance to do a long-form, and that if just given the chance, they'd all line up to fill one out?
If they [the poor and downtrodden] don't want to answer the Fed's intrusive questions then more power to them.
Which would mean... we wouldn't know they're there, and if we did, we wouldn't have a clue what their problem is.
In WW2 the Nazis used the census data in Germany and Austria to locate and round up Poles, Slavs, Jews and Gypsies(Romanians).
So you are saying that people don't have to worry about Harper being a crypto-nazi because he's won't be using census data to locate the opponents he's going to target to fill up all that extra prison space he's building?
Back home in Canada the authorities went straight to the census data to round up the Japanese-Canadians and the German-Canadians.
They were just being lazy because they knew the info was there. If the info had not been there, they would have gone door-to-door until they felt like they'd found everyone. You know how tenacious Canadian enforcement officers can be when they're on a mission.
They feel its both invasive and intrusive.
That's the part I don't get.
They control the privacy of the information as tough as anything can be controlled, so it's not like it's useful to target any particular individual, but even if it was, what the heck are they asking that's so damn intrusive?
I've never done a long-form. Are they asking males whether they prefer goats or sheep for barnyard sex?
All your insurance data, your tax data, your health information and your every purchase is sold to the highest bidder and collated and massaged daily.
Tax data?!? I don't think so. Personal health records? Not in this country.
Are you from the States?
Census data is however generally considered "stale" data.
Quite often the census data is just to dated to be very useful in this age of mobility,daily surveys and internet marketing.
Ahh, so your problem is not that the census is "intrusive", but that you're not being "intruded" upon by private-sector information gathering systems that will gather and secretly sell your stats very quickly.
But to make my tax dollars pay for it?
Everything, from the taxes you'll have to pay for government to maintain order, to the prices of products on the shelf, will become more expensive if any of the stupider methods of collecting stats that you're thinking of were to become the only way for agencies and organizations to get the information they need in order to work-with, or sell-to, a population.
And then to enforce mandatory compliance, again at tax payers expense?
I ask again: Is that your attitude about Jury duty?
