Wanted: A PM With Courage

The government's decision to kill the mandatory long-form census was wrong. The brave thing to do would be to admit as much.

Last week, Canada’s chief statistician, head of one of the world’s most respected data-gathering agencies, resigned over the Conservative government’s decision to kill the long-form census and replace it with a voluntary survey. He seems to have held off doing so until he was sure the decision would withstand the avalanche of protests from virtually all of the country’s public and private knowledge organizations, including municipal and provincial governments.

It took courage for Munir Sheikh to give up a career mandarin’s dream job. The announcement came a full three weeks after his predecessor, Ivan Fellegi, said resigning was the right thing to do, but in the end he fell on his sword over his principles. Clearly, he felt that he could not continue to provide the excellent professional service for which Statistics Canada has always been known under the new proposed system – and certainly he couldn’t allow Industry Minister Tony Clement to go on saying that the voluntary survey had his endorsement when the opposite was true.

The fundamental disagreement with the government hinges in part on whether or not an agency whose job it is to tell the unvarnished truth at all times should be at the mercy of the government of the day. It is long-established practice that other agencies, the Bank of Canada for example, enjoy an arms-length status that protects them from partisan chicanery.

Anyone who relies on census data to plan or manage business or other activities – and that’s just about everybody from policy groups to school boards, shopping-centre developers to hospitals, retailers to social workers – knows that Sheikh is right when he says that no voluntary survey can replace an actual counting exercise. And most of them have expressed their views clearly – from across the political spectrum.

Courageous leaders are not afraid to put their ideas on the table for authentic debate before implementing them. The government consulted no one, as if trying to sneak this under the radar – even though it is obvious that users must be an integral part of changes to systems and processes if those changes are to be successful.

The government’s decision appears to be ideologically motivated. However, the extent and the breadth of the opposition was telling, and a clear indication that both the process and the substance of the decision were defective. The prime minister certainly did not expect such uproar over the long-form census during the slow-news, dog days of summer!

Whether or not you agree with his politics, Stephen Harper has often demonstrated courage in his decisions: the “Quebec as a nation” motion, the apologies to various ethnic groups, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools – I can think of many times where Harper has made difficult or unpopular decisions, and never flinched in following through on them.

The government is dead wrong on this one. There is no way that a sophisticated knowledge economy should be headed in the direction of less data, less information, and less knowledge to plan and manage itself. This is a stupid decision and should not be allowed to stand. The courageous leadership option in this circumstance is to say: “We made a mistake, and now we’ll do the right thing and rescind this bad decision.”

We’re all watching, prime minister. Over to you.