Harper, Statistics, and the Left-Wing Bias of Reality

By now, most anyone who reads my blog has probably heard that Harper recently launched his latest salvo in his party's war on facts and knowledge. If not, you can read all about it in that left-wing rag, the Globe and Mail. Basically, Harper wants to scrap the long-form compulsory census and replace it with a voluntary form. But to make up for the fact that it's voluntary, he'll be mailing the census forms to many more households than previous, so that the whole thing is 30 million dollars more expensive!

That's fiscal responsibility for you. And why did he scrap the long form? Privacy complaints, goes the claim.

Guess how many complaints were made over the census in the past decade?

Go on, guess.

The answer is three.

Why am I talking about this? Well, a recent disastrous internal town hall meeting brought it into my mind. During this internal town hall, a chief statistician seems to be gearing up to resign in protest over these changes. His is just the latest voice being added in protest of this move, a chorus that indicates a potential Fed-Province battle on the horizon, with the media and scholastic circles siding firmly on the side of the provinces.

Will this finally be the straw that breaks the back of the Canadian voting populace? Will we finally vote out this evil prick? Hope springs eternal.

This is, of course, part of a pattern on Harper's part - he's long been antagonistic towards StatsCan. Now, Harper's supposed to be savvy and, to be fair, he's pretty good at twisting the political process to his own ends. In a gaming group he'd be what's called a Rules Lawyering Jerk. Everything he does may technically be within the lines, but only as much as does the "I'm Not Touching You!" game that children play in the back seat of the car. Allow me a visual aid.



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But this is a bad move. It's an obvious bad move - he had to have been aware of the chances that this could play very poorly with pretty much everyone. So, why?

The answer is ideology. The Tories are, more than any other party, driven by ideology, and rather than look at reality and allow their ideology to conform to known facts, they blaze on with their ideologically pure agenda and demand reality conform to them. It's pretty much classic neo-con, an art perfected during Bush's tenure south of the border. Anytime the Tories seek to introduce some terrible bit of legislation that directly contradicts what expert research says works, they'll come back with some rejoinder about how they couldn't give a wet fart about what some ivory tower intellectuals think. (E.g., gun registry, pensions, nuclear safety, global warming, environmental science, &c.) Still, every time they do this, it costs them.

So, they gut the census. They can't do away with it entirely, of course - that would require a vote which they'd inevitably lose. But Harper can make these changes unilaterally - it's in his power to do so - and that will effectively ruin whatever benefits the census provides, as any good statistician will tell you. Hell, anyone who's taken any statistics course whatsoever, who has even a passing familiarity with how statistics works will be able to tell you of how little value a purely voluntary census would be. Selection bias, anyone? And it even costs more! But money well spent to remove the opposition's ability to point at solid research and say "The world doesn't work the way you want it to."

Sometimes I think about the adage "you get the government you deserve," and I despair.

EDIT: Seems that Sheikh is no longer merely considering resigning... He's actually gone through with it, as reported here.