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The Census, Self-Interest and Elections
By Frank Atkins
It is clearly a very difficult job to be an elected official. You can choose to be a libertarian type and do very little, but people accuse you of, well, doing very little. Some will then punish you at the next election. Alternatively, you can choose to be a legislative activist and the voters will accuse you of interfering in their lives. These people will then punish you at the next election. Even with extensive polling, it is very difficult to know that issues will blow up in your face. The persistent game in Ottawa right now is that there will be an election when the polls are favourable to the Conservatives. Election time seemed to be coming for this fall until the Conservatives announced changes to the census procedure. The long form census, where you are compelled, upon threat of jail time, to answer a series of inane intrusive questions, will no longer be mandatory. Who would have guessed that this suggested change would have caused so much furor, caused the Conservative lead in the polls to (at least temporarily) evaporate and delay an election?
The first set of protests came from the academic community. There is a subset of academics who have enhanced their careers by mining the census data and producing policy papers with a suggestion for more government interference in the economy to correct the social wrongs that they have uncovered. Their stated worry is that the quality and quantity of census data could possibly decrease under the proposed change. They do not come right out and say so, but their worry is that they may have to find a new career path if they do not have as much census data to mine anymore. I thought that the protests might stop there, but then the special interest groups caught on. These groups began to realize that if the academics could no longer produce papers that purported to show that their particular group was disadvantaged, there was a strong potential to have their government funding cut off. And so the protest spread. Interestingly, I did not hear very many people say that they were happy to have this intrusion into their personal lives made voluntary. Why doesn’t someone say that if there really are as many people out there who think that this information is valuable, then there will be enough people to voluntarily fill out the long form?
What really makes this whole protest non-understandable is that moving away from gathering census type data in general appears to be a trend in the world today. According to an article in the July 17-23, 2010 Economist, several countries, including Britain, Germany and several Scandinavian countries, are backing away from traditional census methods. Apparently governments already have enough information about us that makes the census contribution somewhat marginal. Further, traditional census gathering methodologies appear to be relatively expensive.
So, here we are in Canada, following what appears to be strong international movement away from traditional census gathering methods. Further, we are moving away from forcing individuals to reveal private information. This seems to be a sensible policy direction. Only in Canada could this type of change cause such a protest and result in the government losing popularity.
Frank Atkins is an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary and a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Public Sector Accountability.
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