I was going to stay away from the pedantic yet strangely compelling controversy over Canada’s census, that entirely unlikely hero of the summer news cycle, involving statisticians arguing with politicians over data reliability and whatnot.

But I can’t keep silent after what our dear Minister for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Treasury Board president said yesterday.

Keep in mind, the reason the Conservative government gave for switching from a mandatory census long form to a voluntary long form was all about privacy. It was absolutely wrong, the Tories said repeatedly in identical-sounding sound bites, to threaten someone with jail time for not divulging how many bedrooms they had in their house.

OK, fair enough, I suppose. Not exactly at the top of my list of government outrages, but a fair, if minor, point all the same. But check out what Stockwell Day had to say on Tuesday:

The Conservative government says it won’t compromise and keep the long-form census mandatory and may actually consider scrapping it altogether.

Treasury Board President Stockwell Day says some European countries have found other ways of collecting data which Statistics Canada compiles by compelling co-operation under threat of fine or jail.

“We’ve also looked at the fact that with the high degree of sophistication and integration of computerization and data these days, do you need to go through that whole process at all?” he said at a news conference Tuesday.

“Countries like Norway, Denmark, have dispensed with this type of information-gathering years ago,’” he added.

Hold on a second here. The reason that many European countries have done away with the census is that they data-mine other sources for information — everything from banking records to school attendance sheets. In some European countries, you are required by law to register with the police when you change addresses. Police files, therefore, are a useful source of demographic information.

Is this the sort of privacy protection that our dear head treasurer envisions? Is this really better than a never-used provision in the law that allows for jail time if you don’t respond to a mandatory census form?

I don’t think the Conservatives’ aim in switching from a mandatory to a voluntary census was really to reduce government intrusion into our private lives. That was made pretty clear when the Conservatives rejected a compromise that would see jail lifted as a penalty for not filling out the long form — a purely symbolic move, since plenty of people refuse or fail to fill out the long form and no one is ever prosecuted. But the Tories said no, it’s not the jail time, it’s the principle of the thing.

Well clearly it isn’t the principle of the thing either. Because what Stockwell Day has suggested is the single largest expansion of government intrusion into our private lives in Canadian history. Right now we have a census that collates anonymous data — it collects info on your household, but doesn’t link it to your name or social insurance number. When the Tories get their way and Statistics Canada starts collecting data from our bank records, our hospital records, our school records, etc., etc., there will be no way to be certain that our privacy is guaranteed. In fact, our privacy, by definition, won’t be guaranteed.

There are only two possibilities here: Either the Conservatives have no grasp whatsoever on the issue on which they’ve decided to stake their reputation, or they are out and out lying about their motivations.

I think the former is likelier. This was a decision made on a whim by a libertarian wind that blows through this government, and when the issue became much larger than the PMO ever expected, they decided to stubbornly (stupidly) defend their position to the end. So they are grasping for reasons why they did this, one day telling us they’re protecting our freedoms, the next day unwittingly threatening to take them away.

But the latter is also possible. If they are lying about their motivations, then to what end? The conspiracists out there argue that Harper’s Tories want to degrade the quality of data. One argument is that, by harming the quality of data, you harm the ability of governments to provide services — a very good condition to have in place if you want to argue, down the road, in favor of privatization of government services.

The other argument is that the Tories simply don’t want to see more detailed information about marginalized communities, poverty, growing visible minority groups, and so on. Statistical press releases declaring “Poverty up in aboriginal communities” puts pressure on the Conservative government to do things it doesn’t want to do, like help people.

I don’t know. You can speculate until the cows come home as to the secret motives of policymakers and never get any closer to the truth. But at this point I am at least certain of this much: The Tories’ census decision is a political, fiscal and practical mistake.

A fiscal mistake, in that the new voluntary census will cost $30 million more than the old mandatory one; hardly a sharp move from a government that just finished lecturing the rest of the world on fiscal responsibility.

A practical mistake, in that anyone who knows anything about this will tell you that the next set of census data will be incomparable to earlier sets; Canada will be in a fog of ignorance as to social, demographic and cultural trends.

And a political mistake, in that the Tories, instead of wisely accepting a compromise that should have satisfied their professed concerns, have decided to fight an all-out war over this one, a war that could end up with the largest intrusion into Canadians’ privacy ever.

If that happens — if it turns out Stockwell Day is talking about real government policy, and not just talking out of his ass like he usually does (see Day’s claim that Statistics Canada is lying about Canada’s dropping crime rate because people are not reporting crimes, something for which he himself has no evidence) — then the Tories will have blindly, arrogantly, stubbornly and pointlessly walked us into this disaster.

For that, they would deserve nothing less than an electoral booting.

UPDATE

This completely slipped my mind: Britain’s new Tory-LibDem coalition government is planning to scrap the census. Here’s how they plan to cull statistical data from now on (from the Telegraph):

The Government is examining different and cheaper ways to count the population more regularly, using existing public and private databases, including credit reference agencies….

Mr Maude said the Census was “out of date almost before it has been done” and was looking at ways to count the population more frequently — perhaps every five years — using databases held by credit checking firms, Royal Mail, councils and Government.

The post office? It’s no secret at this point that the UK has had a penchant for authoritarianism in recent years, what with their huge databases of children’s fingerprints, plans to track every vehicle in the country, and even different laws for different people, but tracking the population through addresses on envelopes? Wow.

As for using “government” databases, I imagine that could mean anything from your medical records to your criminal rap sheet to your history of drawing unemployment insurance. If this is what Stockwell Day has in mind, he damn well better come up with a better excuse than safeguarding privacy, because this is one government policy that clearly does the opposite.

Here is Omar Khadr’s explanation to the as to why he fired his lawyers last week and declared he doesn’t recognize the authority of the Gitmo military tribunal process, as told to the tribunal itself (via CP):

Your honour, I’m boycotting this military commission because, firstly, the unfairness and unjustice of it.

I say this because not one of the lawyers I’ve had, or human rights organizations, or any person, ever say that this commission is fair or looking for justice, but on the contrary they say it’s unfair and unjust and that it has been constructed to convict detainees, not to find the truth (so how can I ask for justice from a process that does not have it or offer it) and to accomplish political and public goal.

And what I mean is when I was offered a plea bargain, it was up to 30 years which I was going to spend only five years so I asked why the 30 years. I was told it make the U.S. government look good in the public eyes and other political causes.

Secondly: The unfairness of the rules that will make a person so depressed that he will admit to alligations [sic] made upon him or take a plea offer that will satisfy the U.S. government and get him the least sentence possible and legitimize this sham process.

Therefore I will not willingly let the U.S. government use me to fulfil its goal. I have been used many times when I was a child and that’s why I’m here taking blame and paying for things I didn’t have a choice in doing but was told to do by elders.

Lastly I will not take any plea offer because it will give excuse for the government for torturing and abusing me when I was a child.

Saramago's Jesus

Back in 1962, Hugh Hefner wrote an editorial in his wildly successful skin rag that came to be known as the “Playboy Philosophy.” It’s a long, rambling and well-composed defense of what the magazine does, and among the many things Hefner wrote in it was this:

It was disconcerting when we first discovered that many of those who consider nudity and obscenity nearly synonymous often drag God’s name into the act—this struck us, and strikes us still, as a particularly blatant bit of blasphemy. The logic that permits a person to call down God’s wrath on anyone for displaying a bit of God’s own handiwork does, we must admit, escape us. If the human body—far and away the most remarkable, the most complicated, the most perfect and the most beautiful creation on this earth—can become objectionable, obscene or abhorrent, when purposely posed and photographed to capture that remarkable perfection and beauty, then the world is a far more cockeyed place than we are willing to admit.

Perhaps the rise of the religious right in the US as a political force over the last generation has put the fear of Old Testament God into the folks at Playboy; perhaps the magazine has just grown stodgy and old. But the publication’s declaration that it’s going to discontinue its Portuguese edition because the cover of the latest issue features Jesus holding a topless young lady is a clear sign that the Playboy Philosophy no longer applies.

This cover, part of a pictorial set that places Jesus in sexually suggestive situations that appears inside the issue (more pics here), is a tie-in to the recently deceased Jose Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

The book, which I haven’t read, evidently portrays Jesus as humanly fallible, and susceptible to earthly desires. Not very different, from what I can tell, from Kazantsakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. In that it’s hard to imagine Playboy shutting down an edition of its magazine for running stills from the 1988 movie of Last Temptation, I would say the magazine has either become hypocritical, or made a rash decision.

Not to mention that Saramago is a cultural god in Portugal, especially now, in the wake of his death. I would say Playboy made a mistake in potentially alienating the country from its brand by censoring Saramago, but given how quickly the company was willing to shut down the Portuguese edition, I’d say it doesn’t much care about the Portuguese market.

Playboy is, of course, free to censor itself all it wants, so long as it doesn’t attempt to censor anyone else. But given the print magazine’s struggle to find relevance in the age of Internet erotica, you’d think it would be happy to court controversy, to ruffle a few feathers and in the process attract some much-needed attention to itself. But apparently you’d be wrong.

CNN reports:

The highest-ranking official accused of collusion with gangs that terrorized the central city of Chongqing has been executed, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.

Wen Qiang, 55, former director of the Chongqing Justice Bureau, had been convicted of corruption charges involving organized crime, Xinhua said. He was sentenced to death by a lower court April 14 for accepting bribes, shielding criminal gangs, rape and failing to account for his cash and assets, the news agency said.

Wen lost an appeal May 21. He was executed in Chongqing on Wednesday.

Setting aside the debate over the death penalty for the moment, I think China may be on to something here in its approach to corruption in government. The highest-ranking official got the stiffest penalty — the exact opposite of what we do here in the West, where the highest-ranking officials are protected and mid-level fall guys are sent to prison.

Note, also, that the “godmother” of the organized crime ring that Wen Qiang was involved in received only 18 months in jail. The courts saw a government official’s involvement in a crime ring as a far more serious crime than actually running a crime ring — and rightly so. This guy was the equivalent of a state prosecutor, after all.

In theory, the same principles should apply in the West. But to believe that they do would be delusional. Just look at Plamegate — Scooter Libby was convicted for a crime that any reasonable person would conclude fell on the shoulders of Dick Cheney. And in Canada the sponsorship scandal was even more egregious: A bunch of advertising execs went to jail, but the prime minister who presided over the government that handed out $100 million in taxpayers’ money to political allies in Montreal was absolutely immune from criticism, and even had the temerity to mock the inquiry into the scandal with a lesson in the protocols of receiving golf balls as gifts.

So China’s philosophy of actually holding accountable the people it pays to be accountable is commendable. One has to wonder, though, how far up the ladder that philosophy holds: If Premier Wen Jiabao was found to be running a smuggling racket, would China put him to death?

All the same, it would be nice to see our teetering, inflexible, corruption-ridden Western democracies take a page out of China’s book on this one.

My “No Country for Anyone Award” goes to … the Maldives, where in late May a man named Mohamed Nazim declared during a lecture that he was invoking his freedom of conscience, and leaving the Muslim faith. Nazim

was promptly attacked, taken into custody, and has been threatened with death and beheading, or other punishments for choosing his freedom of conscience.  Maldives media are reporting that it is the first time in many hundreds of years that a Maldivian has publicly renounced Islam, since Sultan King Hassan IX converted to Christianity in 1552 and was deposed. The Maldives constitution mandates that all citizens of Maldives must be Muslims.

Some time later, after undergoing “Islamic counseling” at the hands of the Maldivian government, Nazim publicly renounced his apostasy.

Nazim was brought before Maldivian media to make a statement to the press about his “reversion” to Islam, while the police are still deciding whether or not to bring criminal charges against Mohamed Nazim for choosing his freedom of conscience. A Maldivian lawyer previously told the Maldives press that Mohamed Nazim had to be given such government “Islamic counseling” before capital punishment charges were considered against Mohamed Nazim for “apostasy.”

Just as Winston Smith in 1984 could be made to believe that four fingers are really five, and just as he could be taught to embrace the all-encompassing love of Big Brother, so too was Nazim made to believe that his freedom of conscience is a perversity — one that can be easily cured by the all-encompassing love of God. (H/t P.Z. Myers)

The official story on the “secret” expansion of the Public Works Protection Act has changed. The Star now reports that the law’s expansion applied only to the area inside the fence, not within five meters of the fence, as had been reported.

“The point is, those mass arrests in the streets of Toronto that occurred during the summit were under the authority of the Criminal Code, not the so-called sweeping powers that actually don’t exist,” the Star quotes provincial government spokeswoman Laura Blondeau.

This is somewhat misleading. First of all, it’s not that they “don’t exist” — their limits were not properly explained.

Secondly, this is not actually a surprise. Since it was understood that the law applied only within five meters of the fence, and most of the arrests took place nowhere near the fence, they obviously didn’t take place under that power. Until Laura Blondeau denied it, I hadn’t thought that anyone was making that claim.

As for the arrests taking place “under the authority of the Criminal Code,” perhaps someone could explain to me where in the Criminal Code it says you can be arrested for the crime of crossing Spadina at Queen. I don’t recall the Emergencies Act being invoked. But then again, given how much information the government has been offering us with regards to changes to the law … who knows?

There is (at least) one other question here: If the law didn’t apply anywhere outside the fence, then how did Dave Vasey get arrested under that law, outside the fence?

Maybe it had something to do with the chief of police himself seemingly believing that this law applied outside the fence.

“The information I was given when I was first advised of the regulation is that it pertained to an area of five metres outside the perimeter of the fence,” Blair said Tuesday.

“Once that information was clarified to us, we immediately notified all of our officers by a directive about the appropriate application of that regulation.”

Wow. So who misled whom? Did the provincial cabinet mislead Blair about the scope of the temporary powers? Did Blair mislead the public when he needed to explain an unjustified arrest? Or was it just a big misunderstanding — so big, in fact, that one has to question the competence of these people?

The message coming out of Queen’s Park and the police is very strange and frankly I’m not sure I believe any of it. They told us one thing when they needed to justify an arrest; they told us another when the initial explanation got a worse reception than the arrest itself.

It’s amazing what a total pig’s breakfast our officials have made of this whole thing. I doubt this story is over.

G20 protest in Chinatown, Toronto, June 26.Toronto police chief Bill Blair and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty are in trouble, and they know it.

Toronto police chief Bill Blair and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty are in trouble, and they know it.

How do I know that they know they’re in trouble? Because of the words coming out of their mouths.

This morning chief Blair held a press conference where he paraded weapons seized from protesters at G20 demonstrations and referred to the vandals who smashed windows and set cop cars alight as “terrorists.”

They were “thugs” on Saturday; now they’re “terrorists.” You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself smearing your opponents with the “terrorist” label.

Let’s put this in some perspective. As Graham F. Scott points out at This Magazine, four police cars were torched in Toronto during the G20; by comparison, sixteen police cars were torched in Montreal in 2008 after the Habs beat the Boston Bruins.

(That’s right, people. Canadians are more violent after a hockey game than they are during a G20 summit. That actually makes sense to me…)

Interestingly, Montreal didn’t respond to those riots by sending twenty thousand police officers into the streets to beat up journalists, arrest passersby and observers (including a mayoral candidate), trample protesters under horse hooves and cordon off some one hundred or more people in the middle of an intersection in the rain for hours — some of whom weren’t even protesters, just people crossing the street.

And Montreal police didn’t respond by putting the arrested in cages, denying them food and water, and then releasing them without charge in what would amount to the largest mass arrests in Canadian history, and in the history of the G8 and G20 summits. Not even the riots in Seattle at the WTO summit in 1999 resulted in such a huge arrest rate.

Those who witnessed some of what went on in Toronto last weekend, and even those who were simply following the summit protests on the news, know what they saw. At this point, we’ve heard far more allegations of crime committed by the police than by the vandals.

Will the police be held to account? Not if Bill Blair has anything to say about it. He’s now fighting the “war on terror” against rock-throwing vandals and God help anyone who gets in his way. If Blair is at all typical of a Canadian police chief, his goal now is to ensure that not one police officer is held to account for beating innocent people, not one police officer is held to account for false arrest — most of all himself. That’s what the press conference was about; that’s why he just threw out the word “terrorist.”

But things are even worse at Queen’s Park, where a provincial government spokeswoman insisted the secret change made to Ontario’s Public Works Protection Act, to allow police to arrest anyone who doesn’t identify themselves within five metres of the G20 perimeter fence, was actually no change at all.

“There were no extra powers granted to police for G20. As we stated repeatedly the regulation was about defining property, not police power,” Laura Blondeau, an aide to Community Safety Minister Rick Bartolucci, told the Star.

That’s some pretty spicy verbal acrobatics there, Laura. You didn’t give police new powers — you just changed the definition of “government building” to include a vast chunk of downtown Toronto. And you did this with no public announcement, without a debate in the legislature, so that it would change absolutely nothing. Sure, that makes sense.

Both McGuinty and Blair smell embarrassing and costly civil-rights lawsuits on the wind. Some of these suits are likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and the irony of McGuinty’s devious little “alteration” to the law is that it has drawn attention to the very existence of this law, which allows police to arrest anyone who doesn’t identify themselves in a government building. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing resulted in that law, which has been on the books since 1939, being severely curtailed by the Supreme Court.

So, to sum up, the whole effort to justify one billion dollars in taxpayer expenses for a summit that was little more than a vacuous parade for world leaders and addle-minded anarchists has just blown up in the faces of the people who wasted that money.

As an afterthought, I’d like to add this: Watching Blair’s press conference this morning, it became clear (if it wasn’t already) that the presence of vandals and their weapons at the G20 is a public-relations Godsend to the police. And that leads me to think about that indelible image of a police car on fire at the corner of King and Bay Saturday afternoon.

That car was set on fire sometime around 4 p.m.; the fire was put out and the car hauled away around 6:30 p.m. Is it really possible that, in the midst of the largest security operation in Toronto’s history, they couldn’t get a fire truck to a major downtown intersection for two-and-a-half hours?

Yet when protesters emerged from a sewer near the Eaton Centre, the police were on the scene and arresting the sewer rats within two minutes. So why was the police car allowed to burn for so long? Did it have anything to do with the fact that, as TV stations from coast to coast broadcast images of the burning police car, police were busy busting up peaceful protests and arresting innocent people?

That’s one of the right questions to ask about all this. Which is exactly why — as politicians and police bureaucrats run for cover — that question won’t be asked.

Just a free-marketeer at heart?

Peter Keough explains his conception of the role vampire and zombie movies play in society. The recent surge in popularity of both types of movies may be related to growing economic uncertainty:

Could vampires … be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies, those lumpen, lurching, mass-consuming legions, could they stand for labor and the proletariat? If so, vampire movies would embody the audience’s anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse. And zombie movies would touch on the dread of — and wish for — an uprising of the working against those same exploiters.

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe teenage girls like to see tales of forbidden love involving immortal super-lovers, and maybe guys like to see decapitation-per-minute bloodbath movies.

Another — and perhaps entirely related — phenomenon is how the language of fantasy-horror has bled its way into the financial world. Think, for a moment, about all the talk in recent years about “zombie banks,” or Matt Taibbi’s now-famous description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”

In our ultra-mediated world, real life imitates the movies as much as the movies imitate real life. I’m not sure that vampire and zombie movies are much of a parable for economic politics, but when people look at the state of the global economy, it’s no surprise they increasingly see a horror fantasy.