You can count on the death of the long-form census to dominate discussion when 5,500 statisticians descend on the Vancouver Convention Centre.
The Joint Statistical Meeting, the largest annual gathering for the world’s top number-crunchers, runs July 31 to Aug. 5. Munir Sheikh, the Statistics Canada boss who quit in protest, is among the scheduled speakers.
“There's probably no time in history when statistics has been so much of a focus as it is now,” said University of Waterloo Prof. Don McLeish, president of the Statistical Society of Canada. “What's happening here in Canada is central to the integrity of statistics. It's broader than that, it's about evidence, facts and balance between privacy and an informed government and public.”
Experts from government, academia and private industry will present their findings on a variety of topics, from climate to cyber-crime. McLeish said statisticians have never been so important but there are not enough of them.
“Information and the availability of information has a doubling rate of probably every year or two,” he said. “Our profession has grown rapidly but it has nowhere near kept pace.”
Bob Mackin reports for 24 Hours.
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DPL
1 year ago
Only the Conservatives are
Only the Conservatives are stupid enough to ignore the long form . But they somehow remain in place as our federal government.
ASKBiblitz.com
1 year ago
Census boondoggle an effort to protect federal turf/grift
Don't play, Tyee.ca!
Don't buy any of this StatsCan long-form Census ruse to conceal the real agenda, which is quite simply a federal bureaucrat's effort to protect some extremely profitable turf/grift.
As every civil servant knows, survival in the public service is all about budget - securing it and protecting it by spending it as quickly as possible, creating make-work project reports for pals to write to justify spending to ensure the amount is renewed and increased regularly.
No doubt StatsCan is a unique source of demographic information you'd think local governments would use to plan development and services throughout the country, but as we've seen here in B.C., planning authorities couldn't give a fiddler's fart about the needs of real people even for things like affordable housing and schools.
About half of Vancouver's downtown high-rise condos are empty, according to the mayor's office, and parents who succumbed now fight for safe parks and school spaces for their kids. Similarly reckless development at the plum west side University Endowment Lands (UEL) has created similar school competitions here. Both the community high school and elementary school are packed to the rafters and falling literally apart with various construction deficiencies, including rats and toxic mold.
Nor has StatsCan ever troubled itself to reveal anything of B.C.'s ongoing leaky condo epidemic, though it continues to cost all Canadian taxpayers and the poor, old environment hugely each year.
With no demonstrated practical value beyond lining the pockets of a few self-serving bureaucrats, the Census forms should be scrapped. At least local planning authorities who sell out consumers in favor of big developers won't be able to assert that their policies in any way reflect or even consider real demographics.
Follow the money, Tyee. How much federal grift is at stake here?
Leo Biblitz
Leaky Condo / Affordable Housing Advocate no thanks to StatsCan or the housing reports it should have but never provided.
See http://www.askbiblitz.com/condo-services.php
G West
1 year ago
@ASKBiblitz.com
Sorry, can't agree with your observations - the census is a valuable tool and has served this country (and every other nation which uses statistics) well.
Leaky condo information collected on the census would be useless anyway since all identifying information is removed from the data before it is used for any planning purposes.
I think you've completely understood the nature of the exercise and the professionalism necessary to collect information properly.