Majority of Canadians want long-form census

The Toronto Star:

Ottawa — A majority of Canadians believe the 40-page long-form census should be reinstated despite the Conservative government’s insistence that the country wanted it scrapped, a new Angus Reid poll found.

The survey, which found almost half of Canadians believe the Harper government should reverse itself, is further proof the controversy over the replacing it with an optional voluntary detailed census has not subsided.

The decision has been decried by individuals, health organization, scientists, and business leaders among other across Canada while the opposition parties in the House of Common are determined to bring it back by getting rid of the jail term for refusing to fill out the form, even though no one has ever been jailed.

So far, the government, and in particular Industry Minister Tony Clement, refuses to budge. Clement even said if only one Canadian complained about the mandatory long-form census that was good enough for him.

The Angus Reid online survey of 1,012 Canadian adults released Wednesday found that 49 per cent of respondents think the government should change its mind while 29 per cent said it should stick by its guns.

The survey, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, is considered accurate plus or minus 3.1 per cent 19 times out of 20.

According to the pollster, 53 per cent said the long-form census yields information that “is important to make policy decisions in all areas of public service and should remain mandatory.”

And 54 per cent support the opposition efforts to amend the Statistics Act to include the long-form census scrapped by the Conservatives in what critics had called ideological reasons designed to appeal to the party’s base support.

At least one Conservative has backed away from his claim that his constituency office received a thousand calls and emails a day about the intrusiveness of the long-form census.

“Yeah, it was about a thousand a day, but I’m not sure from that thousand how many were on the census itself,” former industry minister Maxime Bernier told the CBC in an interview outside the House of Commons on Tuesday.

“So we had a discussion with my staff and we cannot prove it because all these emails have been deleted from that time, four years ago,” he said.