More Census Fallout -- With 100% More American Content

Item:

Canada will pay a huge price for the Harper government's "short-sighted" decision to scrap the mandatory census, say leading U.S. statisticians.

"This decision will lower the quality and raise the cost of information on nearly every issue before Canada's government," Stephen Fienberg at Carnegie Mellon University and Kenneth Prewitt at Columbia University say Thursday in the journal Nature.

Fienberg elaborated in a telephone interview from Pittsburgh, saying the decision makes little sense and the added costs will be enormous.

"It's just mindless," he says, predicting that government will end up spending "billions" replacing the mandatory long-form census that was sent to 20 per cent of the population with the voluntary survey to be sent to 33 per cent.

The problem with these fine statisticians is they do not understand the Canadian conservative mind. Conservatives are insane yes, but not mindless. To Stephen Harper, wasting "billions" is a feature not a bug. In fact, the more money he can waste, the less his government has for useful things like health care and day care. Also, he knows that wasting billions of dollars will give his loonie followers something to obsess over, as they sit in their bomb shelters, awaiting the knock on the door, from the men in black they "know" is coming.

Recommend this Post