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.
Industry Minister Tony Clement created a furor when he announced in June the plan to scrap the mandatory long-form census, which collects data on ethnicity, language, income, housing and disability, and replace it with a voluntary survey in 2011. Critics say the voluntary survey will produce a skewed and useless national demographic picture. The government says it made the change to strike a balance between the need for information and privacy.
The government decision is also "enormously destructive" to the morale at Statistics Canada, which has long been "one of – if not the best – statistical agencies in the world," says Fienberg, who grew up in Toronto and is a former vice-president of York University. Prewitt is a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau.
They are also staunch defenders of census data and agencies that are under assault in many countries.
"Government statistics are no less vital to a nation’s scientific infrastructure than is an observatory or particle accelerator, and need stable funding and protection," they write in Nature under the headline ‘Save your census’.
Detailed, reliable data is needed for everything from determining how many hospitals are needed, to tracking how poverty and prosperity relate to health or education, they say: "Census data provide the gold standard against which all other studies on such issues can be corrected and judged."
Concerns about privacy, soaring costs and plummeting response rates threaten censuses in many countries, but Fienberg and Prewitt say some of the arguments are unfounded.
"Privacy’ concerns make for good sound bites, but the fact is that no one in government is more zealous about privacy protection than national statistics officers," they say.
The United Kingdom proposes to replace its census with a system based on post office address lists, driving licence records and health registries. Many European nations moved from censuses to registries in the 1990s – and some have come to regret it because the records can be incomplete, inaccurate or out of date.
Fienberg and Prewitt are not against change and say census agencies need to become "more nimble" in testing new data collection methods but "without jettisoning the best of current approaches."
They note there is plenty of enticing new information being collected, most of it by private companies.
"Each person leaves a digital footprint when swiping a bank card, surfing the Internet, getting on a plane or using global positioning systems (GPS) tools to navigate," they say, noting GPS data from cellphones can help determine things like rush-hour travel patterns. But they caution that such data is not always representative, or "good enough" for public policy choices.
"Digital data reflect those who use a technology, not necessarily the wider population," they note. And privacy is a concern with data companies like Facebook have been collecting.
Fienberg said he expects that the Canadian government, like the U.S. government, is already using data from commercial sources for national security purposes.
He says government agencies using such data must be "responsible and accountable," which has long been the "hallmark" of Statistics Canada.
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