So the 2011 census results are being released today, or at least some results are. Is anyone else as surprised as I am that there is any data to announce? I mean in the summer of 2010, you would have thought the statistical world was coming to an end and taking much of the intellectual foundation of modern civilization with it just because the Harper government had decided to make the long-form census voluntary rather than mandatory.
The move was “mindless,” the opposition parties said, and proof that the Harper government was “anti-science.” No longer threatening Canadians with fines and jail time if they refused to fill out Statistics Canada’s intrusive, one- to two-hour National Household Survey (NHS) of intimately private information was supposed to irreparably compromise the reliability of the census.
Experts were recruited from the United States to tell the Toronto Star that the Tories move would “lower the quality and raise the cost of information” gathered by StatsCan. Editorialists opined that the Harper government’s assault on the purity of the census would undermine public policy formation and “cost the Tories their much-desired majority” – a majority that, of course, they won less than a year later.
And my favourite: The Tories’ move was “enormously destructive” of morale at Statistics Canada. Huh!? How could that possibly matter? Seriously, it was bad enough that the need for textbook perfect statistics was seen far and wide as trumping a citizen’s right to privacy from government prying, but if the morale charges were to be believed, the feelings of bureaucrats were more important, too.
It was Canadians’ “civic duty” to comply with government demands for information about ethnicity, education level, sources of income, types of housing, number and ages of children and their activities, sexual orientation, family relationships, divisions of household labour, recreation and so on. (This argument also perplexed me. If it was our civic duty to provide such details about our lives, why did that duty have to be enforced with threats of fines and incarceration?)
Yes, yes, I know that material being released today is from the constitutionally mandated short-form census, but the furor over the move away from the mandatory long-form version left the impression that the credibility of the whole exercise was under threat. Only more recently have there been much quieter reassurances given that the use of a voluntary long form would not be disastrous to the outcome.
The whole debate that summer was social or ideological more than scientific or theoretical. If you tended to believe in the benevolence and omniscience of big government and expert analysis, you tended to buy the mandatory census argument. After all, how could any reasonable person object to giving government information that would only help it better spend tax dollars to solve all the social ills in the world?
On the other hand, if you were sceptical about government’s ability to solve big problems, no matter how accurate the inputs it uses to analyse the sources and solutions, you tended to think a voluntary census would be just as useful as a mandatory one, and far less destructive of individual rights in a democracy.
My own personal feeling is that no government has a justification for berating its citizens into giving up information it has no real right to. Even if I were convinced that voluntary censuses were inferior to mandatory ones, I would still argue that the right of citizens to privacy is superior to the state’s interest in scientific planning of social programs. After all, citizens are the sovereigns in a democracy. They do not enjoy privacy only so long as it pleases the state.
Honestly, though, for me the biggest argument against the mandatory census is the futility of central planning. Is the information collected by a voluntary census likely to be that much worse that it would reduce the effectiveness of government programs? Could big-government solutions be any less effective than they are now? It’s hard to imagine that the tiny credibility gap between a voluntary and a mandatory census would be the difference between social chaos and societal bliss.
Under the old mandatory NHS, StatsCan sent out long forms to 20% of Canadian households and got responses back from about 94%. In other words, 18.8% of all the households in the country filled out the long form. Under the voluntary system, long forms were sent to one-third of homes, with a response rate of 69.3%, meaning that under the voluntary system, 23.1% of Canadian households completed the NHS without having to be threatened, scolded or brow-beaten.
Of course there is still the possibility that voluntary responses are less representative than mandatory ones. If people self-select to reply, some groups – notably aboriginals and immigrants – might be underrepresented in the data. But, really, are the figures produced by having StatsCan select 18.8% of homes based on pure statistical theory going to be so much more useful in setting public policy than the figures from 23.1% of self-selecting, voluntary homes? Will the tiny statistical biases between those two models be the difference between, for instance, ending poverty by wisely targeting social budgets and seeing millions more Canadians slip below the poverty line? Will the validity of data collected under force end health care waiting lists any faster than freely given info?
Besides, I have my doubts about how untainted data from the mandatory census was anyway. When I wrote about this issue two years ago, I received a handful of messages from former census planners telling me that it was routine practice at StatsCan to send long forms to the same households census after census. If a household had shown itself willing to fill out a long form before, it was likely to receive another the next time. I, for instance, have never balked at completing the long form, so have received it for each of the last three censuses. If the same people are asked again and again, how is that any more representative than self-selection?
Ultimately, I think a voluntary census is no less likely to produce usable info on Canadians than a mandatory one. Yet, since a voluntary one is so much less damaging to individual choice, it is the way to go.
Follow Lorne on Twitter @lornegunter