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A Stats Geek Fears We'll Lose Sight of Who We Are

Tell your government we need Statistics Canada information.

Frances Bula 9 Jul 2010TheTyee.ca

Veteran journalist Frances Bula writes for the Globe and Mail, Vancouver Magazine and State of Vancouver, her own widely read blog on municipal politics where this first appeared.

As my faithful readers know, I'm a reasonable person who's always willing to consider all sides of an issue, sometimes to a fault, and I rarely get foot-stomping angry over anything.

But if there's one thing that does raise my blood pressure, it's governments who make it difficult to get information. Usually that's confined to unhelpfully funneling everything through a "communications officer" who knows nothing or making you put in a freedom-of-information request to get the simplest report or number.

This time, though, the problem is a move to reduce the amount of information available by limiting Statistics Canada's activities. As my friend Andre Picard points out in the Globe, that is a serious blow to our ability to understand who we are as a nation, what we're doing collectively, and how to plan for the future.

Statistics are powerful

I freely acknowledge that I'm a statistics geek whose fondest dream has been to fill out the census long form. But even if you don't put yourself in that category, the kind of information that StatsCan gathers through the long form and other types of data-gathering currently under threat are vital.

In the complex society we live in, I see statistics gathering as the higher-order brain function of the national body we live in. If we don't get that feedback to the brain about what is happening in all the various regions of the body, we can't react to early signs of danger.

At Vancouver's city hall, people are concerned about it too. When planners figure out the future density needed for a neighbourhood, they look at existing demographics and immigration information and project them forward. Transportation planners rely on the regular statistical information about who is walking, biking, taking the bus, driving alone, or driving with someone to see how patterns are changing ... or not.

Another form of 'downloading'

Vancouver Coun. Raymond Louie told me this week (while we were talking about other things) that he's going to be bringing a motion forward to have staff come up with a list of all the kinds of statistics they use for planning and what they might have to do to continue to get that information, i.e. collect it themselves.

He's worried that this will end up being just another form of downloading, as cities have to spend more money to get essential information about activities inside their boundaries.

I imagine this is something that will be unquestioningly supported by all parties, as it should be. This isn't a partisan issue. I encourage all of you to register protests with your local MPs or the PMO's office directly about this.  [Tyee]

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