The Cons, the Census, and the Horrifying Story of Our Vanishing Canada

It's now been five years since the ghastly Tony Clement announced that the Cons were killing the long form census.

Claiming that it was a gross invasion of privacy, and that they had been "flooded" with complaints.

Which like all things Con turned out to be just another Big Lie. 

The Conservative government listened to only a relative handful of Canadians — including conspiracy theorists afraid the government was going to round them up — before scrapping the mandatory long-form census, according to documents obtained by the Toronto Star.

There were just a handful of complaints, many of them from the usual suspects.

And the decision to kill it was made by one of the screaming voices in Stephen Harper's head.



For it was madness, and five years later the consequences of that insane act couldn't be more horrifying.

Not only have we been left stumbling around in the dark, as Maclean's Ann Kingston writes, many communities in Canada, are simply vanishing.

Melville still exists—but as a shadow. We know how many people live there, but nothing about them—where they work, their education levels, whether they’re married, single or divorced, how many are immigrants, how many are unemployed, how many live in poverty.

Nationally, we’re missing similar data on 20 per cent of StatsCan’s 4,556 “census subdivisions,” making a fifth of Canada’s recognized communities statistical dead zones.

Stephen Harper's war on data is killing us with ignorance. All kind of reports have been shredded or deleted, burned, or thrown into dumpsters... 



We can't run the government or the economy properly. We can't prepare for an aging population. We don't even know what drugs have been withdrawn for safety reasons.

The poor and the vulnerable are being muzzled:

“You see this continual silencing of people who are not ‘winners,’ for lack of a better word,” says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The result is that the government can pretend they’re not there. It’s like, ‘If you’ve got any needs, we can’t hear you, we can’t see you, la la la.’”

Potential evidence is being destroyed:

A pattern of disappearing information has raised questions about political interference, notably, after the Canada Revenue Agency ordered employees to destroy all text-message records. The concern is that the agency was covering up evidence of a crackdown on charities that opposed government policy.

We are slipping into a new Dark Age. 

While the Cons get their information from Kijiji...



The Con clown Tony Clement claims victory...



“We are the most open and transparent government in the history of this country, and we are darn proud of it,” he told the House of Commons earlier this year.

And Stephen Harper who claimed the census was a gross invasion of privacy, invades our privacy to a degree never seen before.

As the government becomes increasingly opaque, citizens’ lives have become more transparent than ever before, says Brian Campbell, former head librarian at the Vancouver Central Library. “The decline in gathering social data about Canadians is occurring just as the government’s ability to gather information about and monitor Canadians is unprecedented,” he says.

And tries to turn us into a police state...



Great eh? 

You know, what Harper did to the census has hardly been mentioned in this campaign.

But it should not be forgotten.

For only by defeating him and his insane regime.

Will we lead this country out of this ghastly darkness, and into the light again...

Please click here to recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers