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Making no census

“Too much information.” Everyone likes to say it, but the phrase has actually become the slogan of the most conservative of the industrial world’s governments.

The ruckus over the Harper Conservatives’ refusal to make answering the long-form census mandatory has both bewildered and heartened me.

Despite the fact that it’s relatively unknown senior planners and civil servants who are fighting the decision, the importance of gathering numbers on info related to the lifestyle and well-being of citizens is now widely recognized.

Know-nothingism is not catching.

Still, it’s a fact that Harper is putting the privatization of public information back on the Conservative agenda – which could profoundly limit the role and capacity of governments to intervene effectively in social and economic planning.

I went for a long walk along one of Prince Edward Island’s classic beaches with my friends and hosts, Walt and Alison, recently, and we found ourselves chatting about the census.

Walt Palmer is more sensitive than most to the kinds of numbers modern organizations need to see ahead in broad daylight, fog or darkness. He spent his entire career flying bush planes throughout the far north and captaining huge Airbuses across continents.

“Numerical representation of reality is everything to a pilot,” he says. By contrast, common-sense observation can be worse than useless. “We also need information to know what we don’t know and what we need to check and ask.”

The metaphor is apt. Palmer’s partner, Alison Blay-Palmer, a geography prof at Wilfrid Laurier University, moves the discussion toward food and agriculture. Her views are based on her participation in a Social Science and Humanities Research Council grant aiming to chart the sustainability of Canada’s food system.

The fine-grained info long available through the long-form census on income and ethnocultural background, for example, provides flashing red lights on emerging problems. Particularly when it’s tabulated with StatsCan’s Canada Health Survey results, the data allows researchers to match health outcomes for a neighbourhood with income and ethnicity, which can be predictors of diabetes, obesity and other ailments, she says.

But Blay-Palmer’s long-range concern is what happens to agriculture stats.

Right now, Industry Canada has info from StatsCan, which gets a lot of info from the census to show how many food imports could actually be easily grown in Canada. Of 82 farm products (barley, powdered milk, sausages, ham, mushrooms, beans, apple juice and cherries stand out for me), many are already grown in Ontario.

In 2000, Ontario imported $2 billion worth of such foods. In 2009, that figure jumped to $4.1 billion, she says. Having that data at the ready, together with stats on urban customers once accessible through the census, “shows Ontario farmers how to tap into $4 billion worth of opportunity on our doorstep.”

That kind of low-hanging fruit can yield about 80,000 jobs, which isn’t too shabby as economic stimulus goes. Until recently, Blay-Palmer thought her access to such data was safe and sound. When answering was compulsory and under oath, info was reliable now, answering is voluntary, and surveys have little significance since the info is biased by who responds.

What surprises her is that other industrial countries are going in the opposite direction from Harper’s Conservatives. In 2009, France commissioned three of the world’s leading economists, including Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to prepare a 300-page report on indicators of well-being that could be collected to improve planning tools.

U.S. President Barrack Obama has directed collection on 300 indicators that will reflect impacts of his recent medical insurance plans. Stats gathering is almost as old as government, and is certainly a hallmark of democratic governments, which use info to cultivate reason, evidence and anti-authoritarianism in public decisions, Timothy Ferris argues in his recent book, The Science Of Liberty.

In an era when it’s axiomatic that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, taking accessible measurement information out of the public realm is a way of transferring management from the public to the corporate sphere. Many companies have as much information on customers’ habits as their therapists, and now, in Canada, they’ll have a monopoly on the kind of data needed to plan.

During the 90s, in the first phase of neo-liberalism in Canada, when it was said that the task of government was “to steer, not to row,” Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney closed down the Economic Council of Canada, while Ontario premier Mike Harris shut the doors on the Premier’s Council on Health and the one on science and technology – ensuring that corporations, not governments, owned the tools for effective steering.

After a decade’s lull, the Conservatives are at it again. The hidden assumption is that the days of government planning are numbered and only one force needs fine-grained information on social and health trends: the market.3

news@nowtoronto.com

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