How Ottawa's war on data threatens all that we know about Canada

Political | 206855 hits | Sep 21 7:30 am | Posted by: DrCaleb

Records deleted, burned, tossed in Dumpsters. A Maclean's investigation on the crisis in government data.

Comments

by andyt
Mon Sep 21, 2015 4:41 pm
Guess Winston Smith works for Big Steveo.
by BartSimpson
Mon Sep 21, 2015 5:24 pm
"andyt" said
Guess Winston Smith works for Big Steveo.

This is your bureaucracy in action. The PM and the ruling party have very little real control over what the do every day.
by DrCaleb
Mon Sep 21, 2015 5:54 pm
"BartSimpson" said
Guess Winston Smith works for Big Steveo.

This is your bureaucracy in action. The PM and the ruling party have very little real control over what the do every day.

But they control the purse strings and policy. It was a Harper Policy decision that caused a Saskatchewan town to disappear from the statistics roles, and in turn lose funding. It's a clever idea to have people in poverty simply vanish because they stopped being counted.

It was Harper who passed the Waterways 'Protection' act.

Isla Jordan and Ulla de Stricker describe a country �without access to large parts of its institutional memory, and leaders without access to the information needed for strategic decision-making.� Toni Samek, a professor at the school of library and information studies at the University of Alberta, puts it more succinctly. Canada is facing a �national amnesia,� she says, a condition that will block its ability to keep government accountable, remember its past and plan its future.

It's Harper that's selling out the future at the expense of an election sound bite that says 'surplus budget'.

Government, too, is operating in the dark, as evidenced last year when StatsCan was unable to provide auditor general Michael Ferguson with job data during the contentious debate over proposed reforms of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. The Department of Finance was relying on data from the online classified service Kijiji to back its position.

A sad commentary on decision making in Canada. And notably absent from Election platforms.

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