How Census-Gate Will Change Canada

Less data won't mean less government programs, it will just mean less well-designed government programs.

The federal government’s decision to make the long-form census voluntary has been denounced by hundreds of groups that would not ordinarily find common cause, except for the fact that they are interested in how public policy is formed. Even though they may disagree on policy issues, they all agree that governments should be guided by evidence when they make decisions.

It has been suggested by some pundits that sabotaging the census – there is really no other word for it – is part of a broader strategy to diminish the importance of government in the lives of Canadians. If there is no data to guide would-be social engineers, so the reasoning goes, then they will be prevented from expanding the reach of the state into new spheres. This is a puzzling argument, and not only because it is based on a non sequitur. It betrays a fundamental misreading of the history of the Canadian welfare state over the past two generations.

The census as we know it is relatively recent phenomenon. Before 1971, governments had access to only fragmentary data sets, and the available resources for analyzing them were, by modern standards, rudimentary. But this lack of information appears not to have been an important obstacle in constructing the basic infrastructure of the Canadian welfare state: its major features – publicly funded health care, pensions, and unemployment insurance – were all established before the modern census. It’s not clear why anyone would believe that depriving the government of data would prevent it from introducing new programs.

Of course, the lack of data did have important implications for the development of the welfare state: it was clumsily designed and wasteful. As a result, much of the evidence-based policy analysis that has taken place over the past 40 years consists of pointing out cases where existing policies were inefficient, ineffective, or even counterproductive. (Think of the reforms to unemployment insurance during the 1990s.) It would be a stretch to characterize these efforts as being part of a big-government plot and they were invariably denounced by conventional leftists.

There’s much more to the census than the celebrated question about the number of bedrooms in one’s house. For example, it is the only database that links such basic things as income, occupation, education, and immigrant status. Any study of the relationship between income levels and educational attainment, the factors correlated with poverty, or of the success (or lack thereof) of immigrants in the labour market is based on data that can only be found in the census. Policy decisions will be made on these issues regardless of what happens to the census. But without reliable data, there’s no way of knowing if those decisions will be good ones.

One of the most fundamental features of our democracy is that citizens should be able to see if the government has done what it said it would do, and to see if those policies have produced the promised effects. Similarly, opposition parties should also be expected to demonstrate that their proposals are consistent with the available evidence. Sabotaging the census deprives citizens of much of the basic infrastructure of accountable government.