Why it’s not enough to simply restore the long-form census

2015/11/07 Leave a comment

Kevin Milligan on the longer term questions regarding how we should leverage more administrative data for future Censuses:

But how exactly should we go about repairing the damage? Census questionnaires need to be thoroughly tested, and then they must be printed. You can’t do this in a few months. According to the Huffington Post, for 2016 the government will use the already-tested questionnaire for the planned 2016 National Household Survey and simply make its completion mandatory rather than voluntary. While 33 per cent of Canadians were requested to fill in the 2011 NHS, apparently only 25 per cent will be asked in 2016. Still, if compliance rates go back to 2006 levels, this should yield a larger number of completed surveys. But much more importantly, the sample should be much cleaner because we won’t have the skewed non-completion problems that plagued the 2011 NHS.

This strategy strikes me as sensible battlefield medicine. Time is short, so the government is constrained in what can be achieved in the few short weeks before sending the census forms to the printer. Making the 2016 NHS mandatory solves the largest problem we had with the 2011 NHS. However, I hope this is just the beginning of a new conversation on the census—and data in general—rather than a one-off restoration of past practices.

In the United Kingdom in 2010, the newly-elected Conservative government also had some concerns about their census. But, instead of acting impetuously, they put in place a process to rethink how governments ought to be collecting data in the 21st Century. The initial report of this process came out in 2014, and a new “Census Transformation Programme” is at work on plans for the 2021 UK Census.

What should Canada do next? Well, the main recommendations of that 2014 UK report were to make greater use of existing data already being collected for administrative purposes and greater use of internet-based census forms. Canada was already doing both those things in 2006. But, I believe there is room for much more innovation.

I gave a guest lecture a year ago to a meeting of data librarians outlining my thoughts on the future of data in the social sciences, the notes from which can be found here. I remarked that we have more and more administrative data, such as tax, employment insurance and immigration records, at the same time as surveys (like the census) are becoming harder to conduct. If we move to greater use of administrative data, we need to be sure we properly balance privacy concerns, researcher access, cost, and data accuracy.

Restoring the mandatory basis for the 2016 survey was necessary, but also easy. The true test of the resolve of the new government on data will come in the actions they take as we begin to plan the 2021 census.

Source: Why it’s not enough to simply restore the long-form census

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“Because It’s 2015” | Commentary magazine

2015/11/07 Leave a comment

The neocons at Commentary fret over ‘because it’s 2015’.

Wonder what they would have said if Lincoln had stated when slavery was abolished ‘because it’s 1865’?

On Wednesday in Ottawa, Justin Trudeau was sworn in as Canadian prime minister. He wasted no time in announcing his newly chosen cabinet of exactly 15 men and 15 women, which fulfilled a campaign pledge he’d made about gender equality. One reporter asked Trudeau why the perfect male-female split was so important to him. The prime minster’s response: “Because it’s 2015.”

It sure is. Back in the pre-identity Dark Ages, leaders of representative democracies felt obliged to cite principles or aims in explaining policy to citizens. Today they cite trends.

One problem with trends is that they go as quickly as they come. As Trudeau is sure to find out, his 50-50-gender cabinet is already passé. Where does it leave those Canadians who don’t identify as either male or female? Tell the prime minister the 1990s called. It wants its social justice back.

That’s only a practical challenge. Trudeau can pick up a full-time gendermetrician to carve up the grievance pie and reconfigure his cabinet with each newly pronounced identity.

There are deeper problems. “Because it’s 2015” kills debate, which is the lifeblood of free societies and, ironically, of social evolution. “Because it’s 2015” is a witless claim to absolute prerogative. It dresses up dogma in the finery of historical truth and casts off inquiry as another freshly uncovered offense against progress.

Source: Because It’s 2015 | commentary

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The Grits are back in charge, all’s right in Ottawa: Yakabuski

2015/11/06 Leave a comment

While there are elements of truth in Konrad Yakabuski’s piece (as I covered in Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism), he over simplifies the reasons for the collective sigh of relief felt by the public service.

It is not driven by an incestuous ‘gene pool’ between Liberal politicians and public servants. It is more driven by education and related experience. We know from polling data that the university-educated are the group that supports the Conservatives the least (government policy analysts are all university-educated). And this support is driven more by small ‘l’ liberal values than big ‘L’ affiliation.

The sharper ideological edge of the Harper government compared to previous Conservative governments, along with a general distrust of evidence in favour of anecdotes and a general less inclusive approach, accentuated the tension between the government and public servants.

Greater alignment between the values of the Liberal government and the public service, along with the latter’s more inclusive approach and support for evidence-based policy, will make for a smoother relationship.

However, the public service needs to be more mindful of its own biases and values in its formulation of policy advice given that it will be less challenged than it was under the Conservatives:

Stephen Harper’s parting thank-you note to the bureaucrats – telling them in a Monday missive that he “will always be grateful for the support of Canada’s world-class public service” – was promptly used by its recipients to line the bird cages of the capital.

The civil servants are already banking on retrieving the sick days the Conservative government had tried to take away from them; the scientists are savouring the prospect of being free to speak out, even if it’s against government policy; the diplomats are yearning to show off a kinder, gentler foreign policy to a world that, Harper critics contend, has been wondering, “What happened to Canada?”

Among public servants, there is a natural preference for Liberal governance. It stems in part from previous long Liberal stints in power during which most of the senior bureaucracy moved up the ranks. In the tiny company town that is Ottawa, decades of intermarriage among bureaucrats, journalists, lobbyists and Parliament Hill staffers have left a gene pool that leans predominantly (L)iberal.

The Ottawa elites share a similar world view, one that squares with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise of activist government. They also share a bias, acknowledged or not, in favour of a government-driven economy. A bigger state and more regulation enhances the prestige, power and bank accounts of this cozy cohort of Ottawa insiders.

Mr. Harper was not the first outsider to see this. As a candidate for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1983, Brian Mulroney vowed to hand out “pink slips and running shoes” to a bureaucracy he considered to be infested with Liberal sympathizers. But in Ottawa, he found he needed to get the bureaucracy onside to get anything done.

Though he purged Liberal appointees at government agencies and Crown corporations, Mr. Mulroney trusted, and in turn succeeded in winning the trust of, most of the senior bureaucrats he inherited. His one high-profile ouster of a senior mandarin (Ed Clark, an architect of Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program, who went on to become chief executive officer of TD Bank) was an exception to the rule.

Source: The Grits are back in charge, all’s right in Ottawa – The Globe and Mail

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The New Cabinet: Diversity, inclusion and achieving parity

2015/11/05 1 Comment

Election 2015 - VisMin and Foreign-Born MPs.002
The chart shows the overall representation of Canada’s new Parliament (the 2011 Parliament equivalent is shown below).

Election 2015 - VisMin and Foreign-Born MPs.001

In addition to gender parity, visible minorities are slightly over-represented (16 percent) in relation to their share of the population who are Canadian citizens (15 percent).

However, Canadian Sikhs predominate as four out of the five visible minority ministers are Sikh: Navdeep Bains, Harjit Sajjan, Amarjeet Sohi and Bardish Chagger (the only non-Sikh is Maryam Monsef, an immigrant from Afghanistan). Likely that geographic factors played a role.

Two out of the five are women. Three are foreign-born.

Two have senior portfolios: Harjit Sajjan in Defence, Navdeep Bains in Innovation, Science and Economic Development (the rebranded Industry Canada).

The choice of John McCullum for the renamed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship department suggests that an experience minister was wanted to move the priority files (in addition to his previous experience in a number of portfolios and was previously the Liberal critic for citizenship and immigration). So very likely that he will hit the ground running.

And the best illustration of how the overall philosophy and approach has changed can be seen in the creation of a Cabinet Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, with a mandate to:

Considers issues concerning the social fabric of Canada and the promotion of Canadian pluralism. Examines initiatives designed to strengthen the relationship with Indigenous Canadians, improve the economic performance of immigrants, and promote Canadian diversity, multiculturalism, and linguistic duality.

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New Crop of Immigrants in Parliament Is Seen as Reflection of Canada – The New York Times

2015/11/05 Leave a comment

New York Times coverage of Canada’s many immigrant and visible minority MPs (and always nice to be quoted!):

Many factors contributed to the sweeping victory last month by the Liberals, whose leader, Justin Trudeau, will take office as prime minister on Wednesday. But several analysts said that one of the most important factors was the immigration and refugee policies of the losing Conservative government.

In a country that generally prizes immigrants as a source of economic growth and officially encourages newcomers to maintain their ethnic identities, the Conservatives and Prime Minister Stephen Harper were widely seen as anti-Muslim, especially after they made an issue of the face coverings worn by some Muslim women.

“The Conservative government tried to use wedge politics, but in the end, it backfired,” said Andrew Griffith, a former director general of the government office that oversees citizenship matters and the author of a book about multiculturalism in Canada. “It should give any political party in Canada food for thought, food for reflection.”

The move was uncharacteristic even for the Conservatives, who assiduously courted immigrant communities even before they first won power in 2006, particularly in two areas that often decide the balance of power in Parliament: the suburbs of Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia. The Liberals and the New Democratic Party also seek support there, but the Conservatives often found that their more traditional approach to many social issues found an eager audience.

Canadian law makes it relatively easy to move from landed immigrant to citizen, and Mr. Griffith said that many newcomers became politically active once they could vote. Because Canada’s immigration rules favor well-educated and affluent migrants, ethic communities are also an important source of donations to political parties, not least because the country’s campaign finance laws ban contributions from corporations or unions and set a relatively low ceiling for individuals.

“It’s empowering in that there are groups that can no longer be ignored,” said Arif Virani, 43, a newly elected Liberal lawmaker from Toronto who came to Canada with his parents as an Ismaili Muslim refugee from Uganda in 1972. He noted that in some constituencies, all three major parties ran minority candidates.

At times over the past decade, Jason Kenney, a Conservative cabinet minister, seemed to be appearing at just about every ethnic celebration in the country — a butter-chicken circuit that appeared to take a toll on his waistline. But Mr. Kenney’s courtship of ethnic minorities, Mr. Griffith said, was undone when the Conservative government decided to make it harder for recent immigrants to bring in relatives, when it was slow to accept Syrian refugees and when it tried to ban the niqab, or face covering, during citizenship ceremonies. Mr. Harper’s use of the phrase “old-stock Canadians” on the campaign trail made matters worse.

Mr. Griffith reckons that there are 33 electoral districts where a majority of voters belong to what are known in Canada as visible minority groups — people who are not of white European extraction. All 33 districts are in the suburbs of Toronto or Vancouver, and many were held by Conservatives until last month, when Liberals won in all but three of them.

Canada first introduced a policy of official multiculturalism, recognizing the differences in Canadians’ heritage, in 1971 under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a Liberal prime minister and the father of Justin Trudeau. Initially, the policy provided funds for programs like language classes, but it has since evolved into a broad legal protection of religious and ethnic differences.

Though it was contentious at first, the policy is now frequently cited by Canadians as a defining characteristic of their country — though both Mr. Griffith and Mr. Virani say it has limits.

Canadians tend to think that, where the United States assimilates immigrants’ cultures in a melting pot, Canada allows all cultures to flourish. But Mr. Virani said that the contrast was “a little bit more gray than that.”

Voters appeared to reject Mr. Harper’s plan to ban face coverings during citizenship ceremonies, but Mr. Griffith said there was still widespread unease about the practice of wearing them, which many Canadians believe limits the participation of Muslim women in society.

Still, despite the tenor of the Conservatives’ last campaign, all the major Canadian political parties favor encouraging immigration. New arrivals account for two-thirds of Canada’s population growth, an important factor in a country where there are now more citizens over 65 than under 15. Geography helps form that pro-immigration consensus by making it difficult to slip into the country as an illegal immigrant or a refugee.

“You can’t walk to Canada, apart from the U.S., so we don’t have a neighbor that generates a lot of refugees or immigrants coming across,” Mr. Griffith said. “That helps the discussion.”

Source: New Crop of Immigrants in Parliament Is Seen as Reflection of Canada – The New York Times

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Cabinet is not a meritocracy. And it hasn’t been for decades.

2015/11/05 Leave a comment

Laura Payton provides the best rebuttal to Andrew Coyne’s blather against gender parity in Cabinet (Andrew Coyne: Trudeau cabinet should be based on merit, not gender):

Here’s the thing: Cabinet is not a meritocracy. It hasn’t been, at least as far back as 1968. It’s always been influenced by a range of factors, including where an MP is from and whether he or she is an anglophone or francophone. And while those factors are practical, other selections seem to be made based on someone’s fundraising ability or skill at obfuscating in the House of Commons.

Give me a good merit-based reason why Julian Fantino held three cabinet posts, all of them disastrous. What exactly qualified Fantino to be the minister for international development? Or look at Peter MacKay, who held a range of high-profile posts, including Foreign Affairs and Justice. Any time cabinet speculation took over with the Conservatives in charge, it was assumed he would never be excluded from cabinet, simply because he was the PC leader who agreed to merge the party with the Canadian Alliance, thereby allowing Stephen Harper to lead the combined forces to victory. Never mind the bungled military procurement files or his use of a search-and-rescue helicopter to shave a couple of hours off his trip back to Ontario when his vacation was interrupted. And who can forget Chris Alexander’s deft touch with immigration matters?

Given that women are half the population, it’s downright strange that no federal government before this one has striven to put more of them into cabinet. Lots of deserving people are left out of cabinet, simply because there are too many excellent MPs from one region or another, and not all of them will make it. It’s bizarre to argue that Trudeau’s pledge to include more women in cabinet means leaving out qualified men, because the corollary is that so many women have been left out of cabinet to squeeze in men who have better fundraising networks, are better known to Ottawa-based party insiders, or know how to follow orders.

Canada’s federal parties have a long way to go to hit gender parity and to elect a representative number of visible minorities. There are 5o women in the Liberal caucus of 184 MPs, for example. While the NDP led the way with 43 per cent female candidates (rather than quotas, they asked riding associations to look for female or visible-minority candidates), the Conservatives were only able to find enough female candidates to make up 19 per cent of their total. You can’t tell me there aren’t more smart women who would want to run if they didn’t feel the hurdles were too high to clear.

Source: Cabinet is not a meritocracy. And it hasn’t been for decades.

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New executives anxiously await Liberal marching orders

2015/11/04 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to observe over the next year whether or not there are major changes (my expectation is that the incoming government will move incrementally, as they develop a better sense of current senior public service executives, given that dramatic change is disruptive when a public service  is trying to deliver an ambitious agenda):

There has been much speculation about whether executives – particularly the deputy ministers, almost all of whom were promoted to top jobs by outgoing Prime Minister Stephen Harper – are up to implementing the agenda of a more activist government.

Some argue the public service needs a shakeup at the top to bring about the “culture change” expected after Liberal promises of openness and respect in the battered relationship between bureaucrats and politicians. “You can’t change culture with the leadership that created that culture in the first place,” said one official.

But most expect the government will opt for continuity, quietly shuffling the people it wants in or out of top posts in coming months.

There’s no word, for instance, whether Justin Trudeau intends to keep Charette as his deputy minister and secretary to cabinet, but incoming prime ministers typically do, if only for a few months.

There’s much debate on what needs to be done to “fix” the public service. Numerous studies – many done by APEX – have examined the problems facing executives and the changing nature of their work over the decade.

[Linda] Duxbury says public service culture was reshaped at every level over the past decade by a government that didn’t respect public servants, didn’t want their advice, barked orders from the Prime Minister’s Office, ignored data, and rewarded “doers” and implementers. Those who “joined the public service to serve didn’t know what their jobs were anymore,” she said.

But “I sense there is a pent-up demand in the public service to show people what they could do, given half the chance,” said Duxbury.

She is confident many of the senior executives who worked in government before the Conservative ethos took hold can quickly adapt to Liberal demands. They have the needed policy- and decision-making skills but have spent the past decade “out of their comfort zone,” with those skills “dormant and pushed underground,” Duxbury said.

She argues political leaders, not senior bureaucrats, set the tone in government and “if the Liberals practise what they preach, we could see a blossoming of the public service.”

James Lahey, a former senior bureaucrat who teaches federal executives at the University of Ottawa, said he thinks executives are generally up to the challenge, and those who aren’t will be weeded out. The risk is that if they aren’t fast enough, the government, with a small window to show progress, will look elsewhere for help.

“In general, people are energized by the expected change in tone and chance to do what they like but haven’t been able to do as freely,” said Lahey.

Lisanne Lacroix, APEX’s former chief executive officer, said the bureaucracy reacted to the Conservative culture of fear and disrespect by building a system that turned leaders into micro-managers: too controlling; focused on details rather than priorities, not trusting the people who work for them; avoiding risks and wanting no surprises.

“I feel people are tactical, not strategic; focused on the narrow and short-term, and their decisions are guided by rules, not judgment. People are paid to do, not to think or question,” Lacroix said.

“We need leaders but the culture is such that the ones promoted and rewarded are the micro-managers, and that has to change.”

Source: New executives anxiously await Liberal marching orders | Ottawa Citizen

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Liberals to restore mandatory long-form census

2015/11/04 Leave a comment

Expected, needed and welcome:

Restoring the long-form census will be among the first acts of the new Liberal government, which takes office Wednesday.

Prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau and his cabinet are expected to move quickly on the formal decision to reinstate the mandatory questionnaire that was axed by the Conservatives in 2010, the Star has learned.

The move, seen as vital by those who rely on the census data, is an important symbolic one, too, for the Liberals, demonstrating a commitment to science-based policy while taking the first steps of undoing the legacy of almost a decade of Conservative rule.

“It will be fairly easy because it doesn’t take legislation. All it requires is cabinet saying so,” said Ivan Fellegi, who served as Canada’s chief statistician for 23 years and retired in 2008.

“It’s definitely an excellent step,” he told the Star Monday.

Fellegi was among the many voices who raised concerns about the Tory move in 2010 — done with no consultation — to replace the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary household survey for the 2011 census. The eight-question mandatory short form was distributed as well.

The 61-question long-form census — sent to one in five households –— included questions on language, aboriginal heritage, ethnicity, education, employment and commuting habits and was meant to provide greater insight into the country and its citizens.

The responses to those questions — and the trends revealed from one census to the next — helped public officials plan infrastructure and urban services and give private businesses insight into their customers.

Munir Sheikh, the head of Statistics Canada, quit in protest over the decision, warning that a voluntary survey would not work.

That warning was borne out as many experts viewed the data from the National Household Survey with suspicion because it was voluntary.

Indeed, because of the questionable nature of some results, Statistics Canada was unable to publish detailed census data for some smaller communities.

“The move to the voluntary census had a fairly substantial impact, particularly for small towns and cities and neighbourhoods . . . that’s where the impact was really felt,” said Doug Norris, the chief demographer at Environics Analytics.

But Norris said the missing data was equally felt by the business community.

“Many companies depend on the census data as a bit of a building block for many other types of information they develop to make their decisions,” Norris said.

Source: Liberals to restore mandatory long-form census | Toronto Star

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Punjabi now third language in the House | hilltimes.com

2015/11/03 Leave a comment

The changing face of Canada and Parliament:

With the election of 20 Punjabi-speaking MPs on Oct. 19, the Punjabi language is now the third most common in the House of Commons after English and French.

In total, 23 MPs of South Asian origin were elected to the House last month. Three of them—Liberal MP Chandra Arya (Nepean, Ont.) who was born and raised in India, Gary Anandasangaree (Scarborough-Rouge Park, Ont.) who is Tamil, and Maryam Monsef (Peterborough-Kwartha, Ont.) who is of Afghan origin—do not speak Punjabi.

Of the 20 who do speak Punjabi, 18 are Liberals and two are Conservatives.

The NDP does not have any Punjabi-speaking MPs in caucus after B.C. MPs Jinny Sims and Jasbir Sandhu both lost on Oct. 19.

Among the newly-elected Punjabi-speaking MPs, 14 are males and six are females. Ontario elected 12, British Columbia four, Alberta three and one is from Quebec.

Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) is scheduled to unveil his Cabinet this week and some of these Liberal MPs are expected to be included in the front bench.

According to Statistics Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey, 430,705 Canadians identified Punjabi as their mother tongue, making it the third most common language after English and French.

About 100 million people in the world are native speakers of Punjabi, most of them based in Pakistan and India. In the Indian state of Punjab, Punjabi is the official language. In Pakistan, despite being the single largest linguistic group, Punjabi does not have official language status in the province of Punjab. Instead, Urdu and English are used in schools and offices.

 In an interview with The Hill Times, Navdeep Bains, a Liberal elected in Mississauga-Malton, Ont., said that although 20 Punjabi-speaking MPs have been elected, these MPs represent all constituents regardless of their party affiliation or ethnic origin.

“It speaks to our commitment to diversity and allowing individual [MPs] to play an important role in our political institutions,” said Mr. Bains.

Source: Punjabi now third language in the House | hilltimes.com

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Top bureaucrats met to resist partisanship imposed on public service #cdnpoli

2015/11/03 Leave a comment

Encouraging sign that senior levels appear not to have remained in denial mode (the change in government makes this all the more pertinent as the incoming government and the public service need to establish trust):

As a new Liberal government takes the reins this week, Canada’s top bureaucrats are looking for ways to purge partisan politics from the shell-shocked public service.

The highest echelon of the bureaucracy met in the spring, before the election was called, to discuss ways to insulate public servants from intense pressure to be “promiscuously partisan” instead of neutral in carrying out the government’s agenda.

The May 13 meeting of deputy ministers was asked by Canada’s top civil servant to consider how Canada’s Westminster parliamentary system needs to be “re-set and if medium-term planning could provide the opportunity.”

The group was provided with one paper for backgrounding — dating from 2010, by the late scholar Peter Aucoin — describing how partisanship has damaged Westminster systems in Canada, Britain and Australia.

The new reality “is characterized by integration of governance and campaigning, partisan-political staff as a third force in public administration, politicization of appointments to the senior public service, and expectation that public servants should be promiscuously partisan,” says a summary provided for the meeting by the Privy Council Office, the central organ of government .

The group was urged to consider how the damaged system could be fixed “during periods of transition and government formation.”

One proposal called for clarifying the job description of Canada’s top public servant, the clerk of the Privy Council.

‘Confusion and mistrust’

“Without a set of guidelines to clearly determine which of the clerk’s roles should be given primacy in situations where duties may conflict, confusion and mistrust can arise during periods of government formation.”

Meeting documents, some heavily censored, were obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act. They represent a candid acknowledgment by the bureaucracy that partisan politics have radically changed the nature of their work, especially under the Harper government.

A spokesman for Janice Charette, appointed clerk just last year, declined to respond to questions, including what actions were taken arising from the meeting. “We are not able to provide details of meetings of senior executives,” Raymond Rivet said in an email.

The so-called “creeping politicization” of the public service dates as far back as the 1970s, under Liberal governments, but the Harper administration has come under special criticism from some scholars.

Ralph Heintzman, a research professor at the University of Ottawa, has cited the example of a communications directive requiring bureaucrats to refer to the “Harper government” in news releases, rather than the government of Canada.

Other examples include a request last year that departments send retweets promoting a family-tax measure not yet passed by Parliament, including a hashtag with the Conservative slogan #StrongFamilies, and public servants working overtime to create promotional videos about child benefits, spots that prominently featured Pierre Poilievre, the employment minister.

“For anyone who cares about the condition of our federal public service, this is a very depressing story,” Heintzman wrote about the “Strong Families” tweets last April, a month before the deputy ministers’ meeting.

“It seems to confirm the widely reported slide of too many senior public service leaders from their traditional and proper role as non-partisan professionals to a new and improper role as partisan cheerleaders for the current political administration.”

Source: Top bureaucrats met to resist partisanship imposed on public service – Politics – CBC News

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