Harper relied on few complaints to scrap census

The Toronto Star:

Ottawa — The Conservative government listened to only a relative handful of Canadians — including conspiracy theorists afraid the government was going to round them up — before scrapping the mandatory long-form census, according to documents obtained by the Toronto Star.

Canadians were unhappy with so-called intrusive questions, the aggravation of filling it out and even a few were convinced the census was part of a government plot, according to Statistics Canada documents obtained under Access to Information.

But there is virtually no overwhelming evidence in the Statistics Canada documents to support the government’s contention of widespread privacy concerns — the very argument it used this summer to kill the mandatory long-form census.

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