Vanishing Canada: Why we’re all losers in Ottawa’s war on data (X post from GD)

[icymist]

When told that his small Prairie town had, in profound ways, fallen off the statistical map of Canada, Walter Streelasky, mayor of Melville, Sask., is incredulous. Streelasky had no idea Melville had been rendered a “statistical ghost town” after the mandatory long-form census was cut in 2010, and fewer than 50 per cent of the one third of Melville’s 4,500 residents who got the voluntary National Household Survey that replaced it in 2011 completed the form. Melville still exists—but as a shadow. We know how many people live there, but nothing about them—where they work, their education levels, whether they’re married, single or divorced, how many are immigrants, how many are unemployed, how many live in poverty. Melville’s numbers, then, aren’t factored into Canadian employment numbers or divorce rates or poverty rates. According to Sask Trends Monitor, the high non-response rate in the province resulted in “no socioeconomic statistics about the populations in about one-half of Saskatchewan communities.” Nationally, we’re missing similar data on 20 per cent of StatsCan’s 4,556 “census subdivisions,” making a fifth of Canada’s recognized communities statistical dead zones.

“To be dropped off the face of the Earth is pretty frightening,” says Streelasky, noting that Melville appears very much alive from his office: “We can smell the wildfires burning.” He plans to discuss the situation with his MP: “It’s the obligation of the federal government to make national data collection as complete as possible.”

Towns like Melville are far from the only entities vanishing from official Canadian records. Physicist Raymond Hoff, who published more than 50 reports on air pollution in transport and toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes—including pioneering work on acid rain—at Environment Canada between 1975 and 1999, doesn’t seem to exist, either. “Nothing comes up when I type my name into the search engine on [Environment Canada’s] website,” says Hoff, now a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Also gone are internal reports on the oil sands experiments of the 1970s. “That research was paid for by the taxpayer. Now, the people who need to protect Canada’s environment can’t get access.”

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As the government becomes increasingly opaque, citizens’ lives have become more transparent than ever before, says Brian Campbell, former head librarian at the Vancouver Central Library. “The decline in gathering social data about Canadians is occurring just as the government’s ability to gather information about and monitor Canadians is unprecedented,” he says. Yalnizyan agrees. “Government is more intrusive and more coercive of information than we’ve ever seen, with the passage of Bill C-51, and Bill C-377, which requires unions to publish information about their leaders—not only how much money they make, but also what they do on the job, as well as their time off the job.” The Voices-Voix study documented more than 100 cases of the government monitoring groups and individuals, among them civil servants, women’s groups, human rights organizations and Indigenous organizations. Blackstock saw her professional and personal life was monitored; in her case, the conduct was determined by the privacy commissioner to be in violation of the Privacy Act. “They were trying to discredit me, rather than arguing the [child welfare] case on the evidence,” Blackstock says, noting 189 various officials followed her movements: “Beyond being shocked and horrified, as a taxpayer, I thought, ‘What a huge waste of money.’ ”

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were-all-losers-in-ottawas-war-on-data/

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If Canada can go from being one of the best data keepers of the world to one of the worst so fast under 'austerity' then let it be a warning!