Les Bonnes Choses

Democratically elected governments are kind of like parents - parents of a large, unruly brood of kids that constantly bicker. Take a developmental psychology class, and you will learn that there a number of parenting styles, though they generally boil down to four main styles. I'm not sure what style the current Canadian federal government is closest to because they don't seem to behave consistently. Or perhaps it's because there is no parenting style described by selectively listening to one child over another. In one of the latest political rows, the Canadian government is scrapping the long-form census. I won't get into what sort of information is collected in this one, but it should suffice to say that it provides quite a bit of information that is both very useful in making informed policy decisions, and quite valuable to research and industry alike, most notably because it is impossible to collect such a large, representative sample of information any other way because law compels recipients to provide it. Also note that, unlike phone surveys, the odds of being selected to complete this survey are one in five, and you are not obliged to carry the survey out while your dinner gets cold.



So here's the thing: Tony Clement, under the direction of Eh Steve, is scrapping the long form census. Why? Reportedly because a number of tinfoil hat wearing Canadians objected to the invasion of their privacy. Never mind that the aggregated data is anonymous. Never mind that without the data, deciding where to direct taxpayer money will be essentially a crap shoot (or, more likely, directed by whichever lobby group ponies up the most cash). Never mind that anyone with any knowledge about how statistics should be collected thinks that this is a boneheaded move.

This is where government and parenting meet. When you're serving up broccoli for dinner and one of your kids complains that they don't like vegetables, do you: a) switch to an all-hotdog diet? or b) tell them that they will sit at the table until they have either finished every gee-dee piece of broccoli on their plate or they fall asleep in their mashed potatoes? The answer, of course, is b, because kids don't know shit about anything, and shouldn't be making dietary decisions for the family. So why the hell is so much weight being given to the same paranoid segment of the population that believes that the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage?