Canada has a new Governor General and an old problem. In replacing Michaelle Jean, David Johnston, a lawyer and teacher, inherits a Prime Minister and country in desperate need of a civics lesson.
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.
. . .
"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.
An auction of cattle raised on a Kingston, Ont., prison farm that many people have been trying to prevent is scheduled to take place in Waterloo Tuesday in spite of major protests over the last two days.
Three hundred dairy cows are up for sale at the Ontario Livestock Exchange. They're from a prison farm that for more than 100 years was part of Frontenac Institution.
Corrections officials haven't yet announced a program to replace the farms.
[Spokesthingy] said, for inmates who worked on the farm, one of their first jobs will be to tear down the buildings they worked in.
There were a couple of things that struck me about those photos. First of all, the crowd looks like a bunch of our grandparents and family members. They are normal looking Canadians...the Tim Horton's crowd. If I was Stephen Harper, I would be worried about making these people mad.
Secondly, they had a hundred cops there, and a bus to take away the people they arrested. I fear for my country.
Harper had potential to be a good.P.M. if he didn't have so many personal flaws like being a control freak, having an ego so large that it allows him to do anything, anything at all to get a "majority" (never going to happen), and to stomp out opposition with fascist tactics and repressive government bureaucracies.
Stephen is yesterdays man. If the liebral party wasn't so incredibly pathetic, Harper would be gone by now. He isn't that good, they're that bad!
Hundreds of farmers, local residents and prison-rights advocates who want the Conservative government to keep Canada's prison farms open set up a blockade to the regional headquarters of the Correctional Services of Canada in Kingston, Ont., on Friday morning.
About 250 people showed up for the three-hour protest, which started at around 6 a.m. along the busy street. Campaigners said they want the government to reconsider its decision to close the farms, which are being phased out by the end of this fiscal year.
"We see the farm as an effective rehabilitation and job-training program that also provides food for the prison system," said Dianne Dowling, a member of the Save Our Prison Farms committee and local representative from the National Farmers Union.
The prison service currently operates six farms — each located in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and two in Ontario.
About 300 prisoners work at the farms, operating machinery, taking care of animals and growing food for prisons.
The farms, which the prison service has operated since the 1880s, cost about $4 million annually. The government has said the money will be used to provide more relevant employment skills to rehabilitate prisoners in contemporary trades.
Anyway, I joined a facebook group to save the prison farms. It looks like Stephen Harper has managed to find yet another issue that I can agree with the lefties about. He's a uniter, for sure!
But have the Conservatives finally jumped the shark? As with any party in power, even a minority, arrogance and complacency eventually set in, this time, in the tragi-comic form of the now-notorious fake lake. The lake symbolizes everything that is wrong with this government: a focus on optics, rather than reality. It’s what they want you to see, not what is really there, like scripting Message Event Proposals for Afghan aid workers, stonewalling on freedom of information requests, or cutting government cheques with big Conservative party logos on them.
The Conservatives should be mindful that it’s not just the rest of the world that is watching; voters at home seem to be finally waking up as well. After riding high in the polls for months, Conservative poll numbers are starting to slip, and talk of a Liberal-NDP Coalition is in the works. Let’s hope the combination of these factors will bring this government downto earth. Mr. Harper should remember that governing Canada isn’t a reality TV show; for voters, it is real life, unscripted.
