I've vowed to bang this drum as loud as I can for as long as I can, so here I go again. I even have some pointed advice for libertarians who still insist on regurgitating the government's party line.
To resume:
- Making the census long form voluntary is still an appallingly stupid idea. There is simply no way that any useful data will emerge from this exercise. This is so fundamental a point that the Chief Statistician resigned rather than let Tony Clement publicly suggest that he and the professionals at Statistics Canada believed otherwise.
- Those who claim otherwise either don't know what they're talking about, or have sacrificed their professional integrity. Yes, I'm looking straight at the Fraser Institute when I type these lines. As far as I'm concerned, all future FI reports should come with the following disclaimer for journalists: This material should not be cited without the express written approval of someone who knows how to do empirical work. Other pundits might be excused on the grounds of ignorance, in which case I question their editors' judgment in letting them use valuable media space to reduce public understanding of an important policy issue.
Let's now turn to the ostensible reason for making the long form voluntary: the well-rehearsed horror at the possibility that someone might be jailed for not revealing the number of bedrooms in their homes. (Can someone explain to me why this is such a big deal? We're a family of five, with four bedrooms. Have I somehow set myself up for blackmail?)
We should first dispense with the zombie meme of "Many countries have dropped the census, so we can too." This has been blown away any number of times, but it insists on lumbering across the political landscape in search of brains.
Yes, there are several examples of countries – especially in Scandinavia – that have abandoned the traditional census. These countries maintain databases that keep track of all interactions between the citizen and the State, so a census is simply redundant: the government already knows everything there is to know about you. For example, they know where you live, they know when you moved there (all movements must be registered with the police), and they know from the zoning registries just how many bedrooms and bathrooms you have. They even know your high school trigonometry marks – why bother with a census? If you're concerned about issues such as privacy and state coercion, these are not counter-examples that you should be citing.
So let's consider the state of things from a libertarian perspective:
- If our government was really serious about privacy and state coercion, they wouldn't be pointing to the Nordic registry model as an alternative to a mandatory census.
- If, in your mind's eye, you see yourself storming the Bastille in order to liberate the foes of tyranny, no-one has ever been jailed for not complying with the census. But, as has become crushingly clear over the past few weeks, the census is the irreplaceable cornerstone of evidence-based policy evaluation. Making the census voluntary offers the smallest possible gains in terms of civil liberties, at the greatest possible cost in terms of responsible governance.
- If you really believed that our government was motivated by libertarian principles, the news from the past couple of days should have disabused you of this notion. It turns out that our freedom-loving government's highest priority is to build prisons in order to incarcerate those who participate in activities associated with drug trafficking and prostitution. Yes, my libertarian friends, our government is intent on tracking down informed, consenting adults engaging in freely-arrived-at exchanges of goods and services at a mutually-agreed-upon price, and putting them in jail. And thanks to your unflinching support, it can do so in the name of civil rights and freedoms!
It should now be clear that the sweaty-palmed fanboy libertarians who jumped on the anti-census bandwagon are being played like a cheap vuvezela. It didn't have to be like this. I don't know what you think you were buying when you decided to support the government, but it seems to me as though you overpaid. If you want to retain whatever remains of your integrity, you should reconsider.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Mike b:
I’ve been enjoying the repartee here, but I do have to say that I’m not sure you’re winning any converts. You libertarians sound exactly like the flipside of the Marxists I knew in University. Arguing from logical deductions from first principles, smart as hell in terms of pure logic, dumb as hell in terms of grappling with frigging reality. Look, even the way you argue, referring to principles of logical fallacies points to the pointyheadedness of your position. You can’t argue common sense because, well, your position has nothing to do with common sense, so you argue lofty principles, dogma, concepts. ‘Ah, your argument is a pettittio principii so I win!’ (Look at your response to being called out on Nazis — you referred to a wikipedia cite on what Godwin’s rule REALLY was, according to an authority, instead of responding to the real world statement put to you which was … “Nazis?? weak, dude!”)
In a lot of ways, to me Marxism is less objectionable than libertarianism because at least it is invokes principles that have been the basis of most major religions. Like, gee, we have some sort of obligation to look after those weaker than us. That simply being connected to a community DOES entail a positive obligation to work on getting things fair. Then Marxists go off into the weeds of logical purity, people get intoxicated by power, then 25 million peasants are starving to death. Whoops.
But libertarianism seems to be from the outset to be false, not premised at all on anything that rings primally true. We will all live together yet leave eachother the fuck alone? How can that possibly work? How do we pretend we all aren’t there? How could that possibly evolve from the tribal nature that is human endeavour? It starts from a premise of moral bankruptcy. THEN it goes into the weeds of logical purity and is abused by the false prophets in power Harper. It’s a dead end. It can’t fucking work.
I do not understand what the big whoop with the census is. Really, I do not. We live in a large complex society, where most of us live mere feet from our neighbours. Government is a necessary evil. It is not my business what my neighbour does with his time, money or body. But there he is nonetheless. And we must have a mechanism to sort out the boundaries of our relationships, to provide some order, no matter how imperfect. That mechanism requires reliable information to function in a way that is not completely stupid. It is stupid enough as it is. We must do what we can to ensure it is not really really really stupid. Seems blindingly fucking obvious to me. Why would you want something that functions even more stupidly than it already does? Because of an ideal of how you think the world should be? Honestly. You want bureaucrats to make worse judgments? You want them to build more prisons for prisoners convicted of unreported crimes?
Arguing from first principles from a morally bankrupt yet intellectually stimulating position and taking it to some logical endpoint makes no sense except as some abstract game. Come on. Wake up and look around. You are completely hypnotised by an ideal. Much like the Nazis!
Godwins!
oh lolertarians… sigh
The internet just wouldn’t be the same without them.
Seriously, though
“nd of course we’re all arguing from first principles positions. That comes naturally. Those first principles inform our entire way of thinking. What I’m saying is we have different first principles.”
Mike,
Can you help out an old Hobbesian like me?
Can you list these core principles for me?
The main one that comes to mind is of personal freedom. Hobbes also accepted that as a right. but for him, it was a right to do anything – even murder.
That brings us to the second principle that I’m assuming you hold: non-aggression. Hobbes argued that the right to do violence had to be relinquished while allowing the “sovereign” alone (the state) to retain this right in order to ensure that the others do not exercise it. He doesn’t posit non-agression as a fundamental principle, though.
You can also take the Millian line that in order to maximize total freedoms, certain freedoms (to do violence) had to be taken away. Think of it as solving a coordination problem.
My question to you is how do you ground the non-aggression principle in your ethical system? Is it simply asserted as an axiom? Or is it derived from a kind of cost/benefit analysis of freedoms with an eye towards maximizing the freedom of each individual?
@Mike Brock
What’s your definition of libertarianism?
@ Mike Brock: I don’t think you’re being honest with both the public & yourself in claiming that you are not, & should not be, using consequentialist reasoning in this debate given your first principle / postulate of some natural rights.
In fact, you do invoke that reasoning above when you say you reject the census for what it’s trying to do: justify more spending on social programs, which you don’t agree with since that entails coercing more taxes / forced labour from you.
And presumably you also use that reasoning to justify to yourself the fact that you do pay income & property tax: in a Hobbesian sort of way, as an acceptable trade-off to pay for the police forces & military & vital infrastructure in order to safeguard you from external attacks to a certain degree & enable to excercise your other freedoms relatively unmolested & more efficiently than if you tried to create (or organize the creation with others) the useful roads & waterworks & sewers etc. yourself.
You might / should even begrudgingly accept other forms of state coercion for both public & private goods as consistent with your natural rights-based perspective based on a consequentialist calculation: like jury duty, if you reckoned that, in the final analysis, that was the best method of protecting people’s rights with a judicial system that maximized public protection while minimizing false imprisonments. Possibly you might even have to favour conscription / the draft in certain circumstances.
So, I submit, it is really just a matter of your thinking you don’t want to contribute to those other public goods because you don’t think you benefit them: not because you are fundamentally & irrevocably opposed to state coercion for public goods.
If so, then the true debate for you should be around whether the various ends this data is intended to serve:
http://datalibre.ca/2010/07/19/major-federal-legislative-census-requirements/
http://datalibre.ca/2010/07/19/uses-of-census-long-form-data-question-justification/
…might actually be consistent with / a reasonable trade off, for preserving the most overall freedom for you, if the gov’t acted on it appropriately to reduce the likelihood of more crime & civil unrest occurring because of various inequalities etc.
I consider myself a libertarian, yet I do not consider giving up on the census long-form a good idea. That’s probably because I do not think that dismantling the state can be done at this stage and even if it can, we should not be starting with the census.
So the Conservatives want to abolish fines and jail time for offenders who don’t answer the long form census properly, and we have a huge backlash with everyone telling us why this is a mistake. All the conservatives talk about is fines and jail time, and opponents of this decision talk about everything except fines and jail time.
Nevertheless, there’s no way around it, keep in mind that proponents of maintaining a mandatory census are supporting the prosecution and jailing of offenders in theory, but no one, not even the most ardent mandatory census supporter, actually supports the actual, real prosecution and jailing of offenders who fail to fill out the census properly.
There are a multitude of reasons for not really prosecuting and jailing. It would be counterproductive, it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute, appelate courts and human rights commisions could find it violates peoples rights, the list goes on, but ultimately it would probably start a backlash against the law itself, which would not accomplish what is desired in the first place, namely achieve a high and accurate compliance rate to get good, quality data for Statistics Canada.
Any political science professor or law professor or historian will tell you that people and governments and the courts follow and support good laws. Governments and the courts don’t have any problems following through and actually fining and jailing people for breaking the law if its a good and neccesary law.
People and governments and the courts will not follow through and really prosecute or support bad laws. When you have a law which the government and courts are unwilling to enforce, and which large numbers of a population do not obey, you must seriously question if this is because it is a bad law.
So everyone in support of the mandatory long form census is doing so with the belief and hope large numbers of the population will obey this law. It will be very inconvenient if a significant percentage of respondents to the long form mandatory census breaks this law by refusing to answer certain questions, or by purposely giving incorect answers. It will be even more inconvenient if statscan pushes for better data and increased compliance by actually prosecuting and fining and jailing offenders.
You want to follow what one set of “experts” say on the census? Well go to Wikipedia and look up Jedi Census phenomenon.
(Lets look at another country because, another set of “experts” has allready decided what’s best for Canda).
Over 53,000 people listed themselves as Jedi in New Zealand’s 2001 census. New Zealand had the highest per capita population of reported Jedi in the world that year, with 1.5% marking “Jedi” as their religion. Statistics New Zealand treated Jedi responses as “Answer understood, but will not be counted”. If Jedi were counted it would have been the second largest religion in New Zealand. The percentages of religious affiliations were:
Christian: 58.9%
No religion: 29.6%
Object to answering: 6.9%
Jedi: 1.5%
Buddhism: 1.2%
Hindu: 1.2%
If you look at the above data, you see that at least 8.4% of the respondents to this mandatory census broke the law. (Object to answering 6.9% plus Jedi 1.5%) .
So you have a law which the government and courts are unwilling to enforce, and which large numbers of the population did not obey. You should seriously question if this is not a bad law.
So a parent claims on the census their five year old son is a jedi knight, or a single mother objects to answering questions from the state that are unwanted and make her feel uncomfortable. Supporters of the mandatory census law hope no activist is really gets themselves charged, but isn’t it obvious well before it reaches this stage that this is a bad law?
Or maybe it’s a good law, as long as no one is really charged or prosecuted for breaking it, because if the law is actually enforced, it could come into desrepute and it becomes a bad law. It’s a good law in theory, but a bad law in reality.
Do you really think that this law accomplishes its purpose, and that the above census data from New Zealand is accurate? Are you really going to make important policy decisions based on the above data?
Statistics New Zealand treated Jedi responses as “Answer understood, but will not be counted”. Why? If its mandatory I thought this was the gold standard. How many other purposely wrong answers were given that were were actually counted as the truth?
I picked New Zealand because if I picked Canada’s census data, everyone has allready taken a stand, and I don’t think people are looking at the other side of the story on this issue.
It’s not just New Zealand with this problem. All democratic governments are trying to deal with the same types of problems.
So how do non democratic government deal with these types of “problems”? They actually enforce the fines and jail time. They will get their data one way or another. What does that tell all of us? We want to go half way, have the law on the books, but not actually prosecute people with it.
It’s no surprise this has come up in Canada. Many democratic nations have debated this issue. The only thing that is surprising is how in Canada we’re not capable of having a balanced debate, and Harper refuses to talk about the need for acurate census data, and defenders of the census refuse to talk about fines and jail time.
If you don’t like Harper, that’s your right. There can only be a meaningful debate if both sides decide to address both aspects of this issue seriously. I am seriously wondering if Harper hasn’t tricked the Liberals into defaulting into a position that could seriously hurt them in the next election, when the Conservatives start participating in this debate and unleash the attack ads (accusing the Liberals of being in support of fines and jail time for not answering the states mandatory questions on your life). I think Jack Layton senses the risks here, and is talking compromise (no jail time).
Social scientitists might be right about the data but wrong about the law and the politics of this situation. I don’t think the Liberals should allow themselves to be painted as for fines and jail time, but that’s exactly the position they are setting themselves up for.
I already answered all this on another site* where Chantal posted this, but of course she ignored the pains I went to there to desconstruct this rather disingenuous post, so I’ll just refer folks to it & summarize it here.
* see: http://scottdiatribe.canflag.com/2010/08/06/the-freeloadersfree-ride-defense-of-tony-clement-over-the-census/ where I posted as ‘Redrum’ (as a riff on a diff. poster’s handle).
In short, not only are her various claims about what most people would do or all profs. would say about truly just laws highly problematic, but she also (probably deliberately) misunderstands the purpose of the penalties, and the little “Jedi mind-trick” is not nearly as powerful at weakening the force or validity of the Census as the PM’s loathesome communications attack dog Dimitri Soudas (whose talking point this is) represented it as being.
The approx. 4,000 scamps in Canada who acted on the world-wide dare to answer “Jedi” on the religion question (which became the weighted response of 21,000) was such a tiny proportion of respondents (0.071% of those giving a response to the religion Q., when weighted) that that “noise” would have no discernible effect on the quality of the overall signal even if it was taken at face value, which of course it wasn’t, since StatCan has a number of corrective measures it takes to clear up anomalous data. And it would only stand out in NZ since they had twice as many scofflaws and just a fraction of the religious diversity we have and where only a binary categorization was used in this rather artificial example.
Thirty percent of immigrants don’t even file income tax returns, according to StatsCan. Would you be so kind as to speak to this data point? Seems disingenuous in the extreme to ignore this eleven figure tax dodge while breaking out the pitchforks over a census.
I tried debating your comrade Moffat in a previous post but he “went Dryden” on me (“where am I? what is Canada? What is is?”).
If you are looking for a debate you need to address the immigrant income tax dodge, and the fact that several special interest groups, including Jews, gays, and immigrants, have serious reservations about giving a government – and the people they will inevitably leak to – intimate personal data; I’ll let you explain to the Jewish people and homosexualists that they shouldn’t be worried about governments creating lists of Jews and homosexualists.
You also need to acknowledge that we live in an entitlement junkie society where duty is considered a fascist codeword and that it wasn’t conservatives who created that society but rather have to govern it. We are also a highly fragmented heterogenous low-trust society; many new immigrants arrive from countries where it is wise to mistrust the government and would view the Censusistas as naive if not stupid – again, not my bright idea to create such a society, that was your comrades who did that, and you’ll just have to live with the consequences of your treasured “diversity”.
It’s not “knuckle dragging old white men from Alberta”, to channel Frank Graves, who are the most against the mandatory longform census; it is gays, and Jews, and immigrants, and asocial techie faux-libertarian crypto-Trotskyists (Mike Brock being a perfect example) none of whom are traditionally Conservative supporters, and Harper is responding to their concerns as any good democratic politician would do.
I am a conservative and affirm that citizens have duties as well as rights but I am vastly outnumbered here in the highly fragmented “Strangerland” that Canada has become. You wanted a low-trust no-duty society, folks, and that is what you are getting – good and hard.
“Would you be so kind as to speak to this data point?”
Why should I? If you went around insulting people in real life half as much as you have here, all you’d have to show for it is a mouth full of broken teeth.
blather on all you like, PC, but there’s little point in “debating” a heckler. I seriously doubt your ‘30% of immigrants don’t pay income tax’ figure, which you pulled out of your ass, but even if it’s true, plenty of others can fight that battle, if need be: one needn’t oppose everything wrong to be perfectly justified in opposing something wrong. And as far as I can tell, it’s only Levant (you say) and Stockwell Day (he said) who think Jewish people are nervous about this; whereas as Mike pointed out, the Canadian Jewish Congress (and the Chinese Canadian National Council, too, for that matter: http://www.ccnc.ca/content/pr.php?entry=216 ) have both come out against this. As for the gay community, I haven’t heard anything about their position about this (andI’ve been tracking this extensively for 6 weeks now), but FYI, the same-sex relationship q’s are asked on the short form, not the long form, which is still mandatory (and with the threat of jail terms still intact, too!), so if they do genuinely have a problem with it, then by your (dim) lights, Harper’s sure running roughshod over their rights, then, isn’t he? Bonehead.
“Why should I? If you went around insulting people in real life half as much as you have here, all you’d have to show for it is a mouth full of broken teeth.”
OK, debate’s over, and the Censusistas lost, big time. The key play was my introducing politically incorrect data showing that 30% of immigrants don’t even file income tax returns and that absolutely killed the argument that Censusistas care deeply about Canada and good data and public policy based on good data. They don’t care, at all. They tacitly approve of mass tax form dodging and therefore census dodging and are only knee jerk opposing this initiative because of good ol’ partisan hackery.
Can we move on to a better topic, such as indicting Canadian academic economists at the Hague for gross human rights violations, such as supporting massive deficit spending which violates intergenerational equity, a UN recognized human right?
Appolo – the 30% figure was widely reported in the media and I was aware of it even before then as I do independent research on these matters, as should any good citizen. The funny part is that the government’s analysts initially wrongly interpreted the data – lack of tax returns for immigrants – as meaning they left the country, which led to questions about the loyalty of immigrants and the suitability of Canada as a place to live, so they chose a slightly less un-PC explanation. Separately, why do leftists even pretend to care about data when they just ignore data when confronted with figures that smash their narrative, as you so perfectly demonstrated? You guys hate data, don’t pretend otherwise. Thirty nine percent of female tax filers paid zero income tax last year, is that a “hate fact” too, or are you going to grow the hell up and face reality?
Blowing smoke causes brain cancer.
Here’s how the tax evasion of immigrants was initially reported in 2006:
“Basing their findings on landing records, census data and income tax files over the past two decades, researchers found one-third of male immigrants aged 25 to 45 at the time they arrived in Canada left within 20 years. More than half of those who left did so within the first year.”
sauce: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/thestar/access/995738911.html?dids=995738911:995738911&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Mar+02%2C+2006&author=Nicholas+Keung&pub=Toronto+Star&desc=Many+skilled+immigrants+aren%27t+staying%3B+Report+details+newcomer+%27brain+drain%27+1+in+6+males+leaves+Canada+in+first+year&pqatl=google
They (the gubmint) assumed, wrongly, that not filing a tax return meant they had left the country. Lots of dinero went to the immigrant industry, wrongly, for many years because bureaucrats misrepresented data which suggested Canadians were big fat racists who didn’t hire immigrants.
Now, here’s the real story as reported by CP in 2008, and a perfect example of ideologically driven bureaucrats initially misinterpreting data for ideological reasons:
“OTTAWA One of every three recent immigrants to Canada who have never filed an income-tax return were either unaware of the requirement or simply didn’t know how, suggests internal research for the Canada Revenue Agency.
A study, based on focus groups involving more than 500 people, also found that almost half were unaware that all of their income from around the world, not just in Canada, must be declared.
“The survey results showed that the level of awareness of the requirement to report worldwide income was quite low,” says a report obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
The study was based on 10 focus-group sessions held in the Toronto area in 2002. A total of 522 people participated, most of them referred by local schools offering English-language training.
Surveys filled out anonymously by the recent immigrants showed that most – almost two-thirds – had never filed a Canadian income-tax return. Many of these were low-or no-income students who were not required to file.
But 16.5 per cent failed to file because they didn’t know they had to. And another 16.1 per cent did not complete the complex tax forms because they did not know how.”
sauce: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TdyjZPzIBFQJ:www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php%3Fmodule%3Dpagemaster%26PAGE_user_op%3Dview_page%26PAGE_id%3D3312%26MMN_position%3D92:90+2008+agency+canada+canadian+revenue+tax+unaware&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
So, I’ve proven that it was widely reported recently by the Canadian Press that a good 30% of immigrants can’t be arsed to fill out a tax return, let alone pay taxes, as claimed. And if a single economist here or anywhere in Canada spoke to that I will eat my hat.
Where was the civic duty bandwagon then? Do you think census data pays for healthcare, roads, sewers, pay equity settlements, public sector union wages, and pensions? No! Taxes do! You are colluding with those who would destroy your precious welfare state! What in the name of John Kenneth Galbraith are you doing? But getting back to my original point, it goes well beyond illogical to give this a free pass while kicking up a fuss over a census.
You still here? Sigh. Well, at least brought some evidence, for a change. And you demand a response in the name of all that’s good and holy for you Proper Conservatives, do you? Fine.
First, this whole issue is a red herring: i.e., it’s irrelevant. Your claim that “it goes well beyond illogical to give this a free pass while kicking up a fuss over a census” is just a clumsy ad hominem, trying to portray the critics of the census decision as somehow being hypocritical. But it does no such thing, for several reasons.
First, many — certainly I myself, who’s been quite vocal on this on several fora — was completely unaware of this other issue, so I/we can hardly said to have condoned it, inconsistently or otherwise.
Second, it is an entirely different issue, regarding the central reason so many of us are wedded to the mandatory nature of the long form data: viz., we want it to ensure high quality data for the government to make its decisions and for others to do policy research with, among other things. (It’s not as though we’re in love with the being slavish to gov’t bit — that’s just the means to the end.)
Third, the fact that many newcomers aren’t filing income taxes isn’t nearly as sinister as you seem to think it is: it doesn’t mean that they aren’t paying income tax — just that they’re not filing returns. In fact, most of them are probably over-paying, since they probably would have had some sort of refund coming that they wouldn’t get. And one of the articles itself points out that a goodly portion of them had such low incomes that they were not even legally required to file.
Fourth, it’s absurd to try to consruct a Frankensteinian straw-man of all the leftist & bureaucratic etc. views you object to and say that anyone who objects to revoking the mandatory long form census is thereby committed to all those views & they all stand or fall together; that’s just nuts. A charge of inconsistency only has effect against an argument concerning some particular view if there’s an inconsistency among the premises or principles involved in that particular argument — whereas the flag you’re actually trying to run up the pole is “Guilt by association.”
Finally, even if I myself had some inconsistent views with regard to some political philosophy, so what? The measure of a good argument is not whether the person who advances it is totally free from cognitive dissonance (for who among us really is? certainly not you, who’ll keep thinking you “won” the argument even when all your premises and inferences are debunked), it’s whether its premises are well-supported empirically (where applicable) and its reasoning is logically valid.
I don’t follow the tax return angle – you aren’t required to file them, but you’re not likely to get a refund or anything else back if you don’t. Those herring are awfully red these days.