From Democracy to Imperial Government: The Conservative War on Raw Facts Continues


It is not really a secret that our conservative government feels a certain unease about facts. Be they those facts which relate to the F35 costs or those facts which relate to major military undertakings like Libya.  None of this should be surprising given the degree of contempt the government has shown to even collecting the facts in a factual manner.

The series of budget cuts to Statistics Canada, once globally regarded as a best practice institution, has meant that they have had to eliminate a series of surveys.  Add to that the changes to the census, and ability of Statistics Canada to even calibrate the remaining facts they can afford to collect has been thoroughly undermined.

If all of this was not bad enough, we now have the spectacle of a federal ministry refusing to divulge the facts to statistics Canada.  HRDC has now decided that it will no longer provide EI data to Statistics Canada.  This series has been compiled since 1943.

In short, all governments since 1943, in times of war and peace, in times of economic boom and bust, under Liberal and Conservatives governments alike have collected and disseminated this data.  This key series has now been terminated because HRDC will not provide the information it already has (at no extra cost involved) to Statistics Canada.  No explanation has been given by the government.

The key to democratic governance is responsibility.  The government is to be responsible to parliament and parliament to the citizens.  A democratic system requires transparency so that citizens can gauge the performance of not only the government but indeed parliament as a whole.

Facts rarely speak for themselves, and they are of course up for an endless activity of interpretation, reinterpretation and thus spin.  This government seems to be so lazy they do not even want to try to spin the facts:  far better to just abolish the facts and rule by fiat.

This is an Imperial, not a democratic government.