As Harper’s Television ads take pot-shots at his opponents, the PM seems to have conveniently forgotten about some indefensible lapses in decision making during his tenure. One charge which he may run out of explanation for would be that of misrepresentation of facts.
In July 2010 Dr Munir Sheikh resigned from his post of Canada’s chief statistician. His resignation was a direct fallout of the government’s attempt to misrepresent facts to Canadians about the accuracy of planned voluntary survey.
Planned voluntary that came as a replacement of the old and testified long-form census.
This initiative of the government met with overwhelming opposition from the academics, economists, statisticians and others who sporadically criticized the government’s deplorable decision to eliminate the long-form Census.
They reiterated that eliminating the long-form would damage longitudinal studies involving comparison of statistic over a time. Additionally the voluntary survey would be prone to sampling errors. Without rhyme or reason the Harper government had then defended the move by citing privacy concerns. So gigantic was the error that the Auditor General of Canada reported that the 2011 NHS cost Canadians $22 million more as the new survey produced inferior data.
It will be interesting to see whether Canadians have forgiven Harper for unapolegetically playing with numbers or the that they have moved on to a new Harper who now doesn’t mind intruding into privacy under the garb of tackling terrorism…Only time will say.
