Much has been made by the media of the government's recent decision to abandon the mandatory long-form census. And of course, we hear every spasmodic complaint in the book being thrown around. We even have the looneys like Liberal MP Joyce Murray going so far as to call the government tyrannical.
Joyce Murray wouldn't know what tyrannical is if she was hit by pepper spray at an APEC conference in her home town of Vancouver.
But, I digress...
The real heavy-handedness going on is in the manner by which this census information is obtained. It is one thing to get an accurate view of the people in the room, city, province or country. It is an entirely different thing to threaten them with financial penalties and jail time if they don't sit down and divulge specific information about themselves, their homes, their families and anything else Statscan wants to know.
Extortion is extortion. If you need to apply the threat of force to obtain something of value, there is no other word for it. The government doesn't own us; we employ them. This means that if people do not want to give the government this information (and we have plenty of evidence that they do not) then they should not be threatened by force to do so.
If this is important information, there are other means to obtain it. We live in the information age where much of the information they are requesting could be obtained by well-maintained computer records. I know, I know... how can we expect our civil servants to do a good job, right? And a well maintained system would be far more precise and comprehensive than any form to be filled.
We certainly don't need a government that threatens its citizens to get what it wants.
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