Stephen Harper and the Dumbing Down of Canada

Oh. My. Galileo. I see that a liberal backbencher's brave attempt to revive the mandatory long-form census, that Stephen Harper killed five years ago, has sadly but predictably failed.

Liberal MP Ted Hsu’s drive to resurrect the long-form census has come to an end. His private member’s bill to bring back the long-form census and bolster the independence of the chief statistician was voted down on second reading in the Commons on Wednesday.

And for the same reasons Harper gave back then, when he ordered that it be destroyed.

Bill C-626 had the support of the opposition parties but Conservatives had said they were opposed to the core principles of the bill, arguing it would legally compel Canadians to answer intrusive questions.



Because he was almost as crazy then as he is now. Except that now he's happily trying to invade our privacy with his sinister spying bill C-51.

And now we're all living in his dumbed down Canada. 

The mandatory long-form census, distributed to one in five Canadian households, had a response rate of 93.5 per cent when it was last conducted in 2006. The National Household Survey, on the other hand, had a pitiful response rate of 68.6 per cent in 2011. The government tried to compensate by sending the survey to 10 per cent more Canadian households, at an extra cost of $22 million. Unfortunately, that doesn’t address the self-selection bias inherent to voluntary surveys.

When surveys are voluntary, certain groups of people are much less likely to complete them. Specifically, the very poor, the very rich, and people most likely to need government services were markedly less likely to return the National Household Survey — meaning those groups are substantially underrepresented in the data. The methodology of the National Household Survey is so bad it wouldn’t even pass muster in an introductory statistics class.

Condemned to stumble around in the darkness of his ghastly Harperland...



"It is no longer possible to...monitor the spread of poverty, check which diseases are on the rise, or determine whether the middle class is shrinking."

The Toronto Star


And the good news? We are not alone in wanting to bring back the long-form census.

With every passing day Harper's decision to kill it looks crazier and crazier. 

Because let's not forget it WAS his decision.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided at the end of December to scrap the mandatory long-form census despite being told by Statistics Canada officials that important data would likely be lost or impaired as a result.

He was warned, but still he killed it.

Which can only make him look even more like a MANIAC...



And we will be use that against him in the next election, when we ask Canadians whether they want the long-form census AND our Canada back.

In the meantime settle back in your chairs, and clap along with the Con clowns as they vote to kill the attempt to revive the census...



Try to remember the faces all those hapless stooges, because they're all going down with him.

And now please stand for the National Anthem of Harperland...



Duh duh dee doh.

Or better still prepare to defeat those Con clowns.

Before they make us all look like idiots.

And dumb us down further...



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