Clarifying Harper government disinformation about census complaints

The following two news reports and documents released via Access to Information Act clarifies some of Harper government’s disinformation about census complaints

- “Industry Canada queried Bernier census claims“, CBC News (emphasis added)

“An Industry Canada employee questioned Conservative MP Maxime Bernier’s claims in July that as minister he received about 1,000 complaints a day about the mandatory long-form census, internal documents obtained by CBC News show.

[...] Industry Canada’s “internal survey of correspondence did not show anything close to a thousand a day,” he wrote to Statistics Canada’s Connie Graziadei, adding in brackets “we got a standard 25-30 a year.”" [K comment: This, paradoxically, shows how important factual statistics collection is. Claim of 1,000 complaints a day with NO factual support of these complaints is another example of playing loose with facts at best and unethical behaviour at worst.]

- “Industry Canada’s query to StatsCan about Bernier claims on census complaints“, documents released to CBC News via the “Access to Information Act“.

- “Census change not about complaints: Bernier“, CBC News

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