by Paul Wells
So, during the period covered by the Colvin memos, Canadian troops were combat-green and run ragged. In the transfer of prisoners from temporary Canadian authority to longer-lasting Afghan detention, there were frequent “stops and starts,” Leslie said. There would be allegations of torture. The detainee transfer process would grind to a halt. The allegations would be investigated. Sometimes procedures would change. Transfers would resume. “The various operational commanders had the authority to decide [to halt transfers] on their own because you didn’t want a political spin put on it,” Leslie said. “In the final analysis it’s the people wearing the uniform who are subject to [accusations of] war crimes. We take all that very seriously.”
Leslie gave me the strong impression that military commanders didn’t like having to handle the challenges of ensuring proper treatment of detainees on top of the need to protect the population of Kandahar—and to keep from dying—during those chaotic years. But, he added, “I think a bunch of the oversight and investigations, and the legal scholars who were swarming all over the armed forces in that period, did some good work in trying to keep everybody focused on what we were supposed to be doing right, and what we were doing wrong.”
Further demonstrating the gap between the Conservatives and the military on questions of openness, Leslie said he wishes the Harper government had simply been more forthcoming about the challenges of warfare. “In retrospect, if someone had stood up and said, ‘We’re new at this and admit we don’t have all the answers, and we’re willing to take all criticisms—and by the way, Lawyer A and Human Rights Person B, why don’t you come over and give us a hand?’—that might have been a better solution than circling the wagons and shooting outwards.” But the imaginary government Leslie was describing, frank and modest and willing to admit flaws, was never going to be Harper’s government.
Much later, in June 2012, the MPCC released its final report into the allegations of detainee abuse. It found the original 2008 complaint, which had been brought by Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, “unsubstantiated.” It found “no grounds” to suspect that the military police officers who were the object of the original charges had breached their duty. Their behaviour “met the standards of a reasonable police officer.”
The report contained a full chapter on the government’s refusal to provide needed evidence. “The doors were basically slammed shut on document disclosure,” the report said. And not just the doors to the MPCC. In mid-December, just weeks after Colvin’s explosive testimony, rumours started circulating in Ottawa that Harper was thinking of proroguing Parliament, putting an end to the current session and restarting the legislative agenda with a new Throne Speech in the new year. The move was plainly designed to cool down a Parliament grown suddenly too hot over the detainee allegations for Harper’s taste. On December 30, after the House had risen for its regularly scheduled Christmas break, Harper telephoned Michaëlle Jean and asked her to consent to a prorogation. He obtained it without delay. Parliament would reconvene at the beginning of March. Harper’s spokespeople framed the delay as an attempt to ensure that nothing distracted Canadian citizens from the Vancouver Winter Olympics in February.
Now, governments prorogue Parliament from time to time. Jean Chrétien had done it a couple of times himself. Harper had done it in 2007 and very few people noticed or minded. But this time it felt, to Harper’s opponents, like an echo of his trip to Rideau Hall to save his political hide at the height of the coalition crisis, barely a year earlier. Ignatieff, Layton and Duceppe were furious. Two hundred thousand people joined a Facebook group to protest the shutdown of Parliament. Anti-prorogation rallies across Canada on January 23 drew more than twenty-two thousand people.
At first the Conservatives figured the protesters and Facebookers were just more of the usual suspects. Fewer than 38 percent of voters had supported Conservatives in the 2008 election. It would be easy enough to find a few tens of thousands of sensitive souls out of the other 62 percent. But over time it was becoming clear that this wasn’t just an issue that offended the sensibilities of people who would never vote Conservative anyway. The House of Commons was empty. People expected their MP to show up for work, and that wasn’t happening. An EKOS poll just before the rallies suggested that Conservatives and Liberals now stood at a virtual tie. Ignatieff had consistently failed to lay a glove on Harper. But Harper had managed, once again, to hurt himself.
The beautiful pageantry of the Vancouver Olympics did fill part of the news vacuum Harper had created by shutting down Parliament. The return of Parliament in the first week of March brought a measure of normalcy and, with it, put a floor under the Conservatives’ decline. The opposition parties pressed for documents relating to the detainee crisis. The Conservatives stonewalled, citing national security needs. Peter Milliken, the Liberal MP who had served for more than a decade as the well-liked Speaker of the House, ruled that the government must come up with the documents within weeks. The government kept stalling anyway, while insisting that it was following Milliken’s orders. The drama dragged out over half of 2010.
If the detainee issue showed Harper’s determination to keep a secret even when greater openness might have helped, another 2010 controversy showed how important it was to him to reward and reinforce the right-wing base of his party, even when it meant leaving centrists baffled or furious. This was the decision to destroy the long-form census.
That’s not the way the government announced it. In fact, it wasn’t announced at all. On June 17, an order-in-council (a cabinet decision implemented, as many such decisions can be, without recourse to Parliament) stated that the only mandatory census questions in 2011 would be the very basic questions in the short-form questionnaire. By default, the much more elaborate long-form census would become voluntary. There would be no penalty at all for failing to fill the long form out. In an apparent bid to compensate for people who wouldn’t bother, the now-voluntary long form would be sent to more houses. The decision appeared in the Canada Gazette, the official record of government decisions, on June 26, 2010. Canadian Press reporter Jennifer Ditchburn reported on the move three days later. She quoted an anonymous source at Statistics Canada: “It will be a disaster. A lot of policy across Canada has been based on that long form.”
She also quoted a spokesperson for Tony Clement, the industry minister, and responsible for Statistics Canada: “Our feeling was that the change was to make a reasonable limit on what most Canadians felt was an intrusion into their personal privacy in terms of answering the longer form.”
Right off the bat, it was easier to find people who thought the decision was a disaster than people who had felt intruded upon. “There is no exaggerating the boneheadedness of this decision,” Stephen Gordon, a Laval economist, wrote on his widely read blog. “It’s not often that sample selection bias becomes an issue of national importance, but then again, it’s not often that census sampling design is outsourced to drunken monkeys.” Making the questionnaire voluntary would result in greater compliance among some parts of the population than others, Gordon wrote. And there’d be no way to know which groups it was, because there was no baseline against which to compare the new data. And incidentally, once the 2011 data set was compromised, returning to a mandatory census in the future wouldn’t fix the 2011 data.
Before long he had company. The Canadian Association of University Teachers protested the move, and a group representing business economists, and the editorial boards of the Edmonton Journal, Victoria Times-Colonist and other newspapers (“The census is us,” the Toronto Star proclaimed). The controversy quickly snowballed. Well, it wasn’t much of a controversy, actually; it was more of a mauling. Three weeks after the original CP story, my Maclean’s colleague Aaron Wherry produced a partial list of organizations opposing the end of the long-form census. They included:
… the town of Smith Falls … provincial governments in Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island, representatives from the
United Way, Canadian Labour Congress, Toronto Board of Trade, Canadian Nurses Association and Canadian Public Health Association, city officials in Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer, Ottawa city council, former clerk of the Privy Council Alex Himelfarb, the chief economist of the Greater Halifax Partnership, the French Language Services Commissioner of Ontario, the executive director of the Société franco-manitobaine, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, the Quebec Community Groups Network, the president of the CD Howe Institute, the Canadian Council on Social Development, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the director of Toronto Public Health, Mr. Census, the Statistical Society of Canada, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Canadian Marketing Association, the Canadian Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities, the Executive Council of the Canadian Economics Association, the director of the Prentice Institute at the University of Lethbridge, the senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Canadian Institute of Planners, the Canadian Association for Business Economics, the co-chairman of the Canada Census Committee, Ancestry.ca, the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the former head of Statistics Canada.
Within days after he compiled that list, it grew by dozens of other names.
Against that list of organizations outraged by the end of the mandatory census, the government was able to cite precisely two complaints from individual Canadians to the privacy commissioner about the 2006 mandatory census, and twenty-two expressions of concern to Statistics Canada.
The list of those protesting the change soon included Munir Sheikh, Canada’s chief statistician until he resigned from his post on July 21. Sheikh was no troublemaker. He had been a public servant for thirty-five years, and was well familiar with the notion that bureaucrats offer advice and governments do what they want with the advice. Sheikh had stood by his department and kept mum about his minister’s choices for nearly a month, until he read the Globe on that morning of July 21. What he saw there wasn’t Tony Clement taking responsibility for the census change. What he saw was Clement claiming he had been following Sheikh’s advice.
“The impression we’ve got from your comments over the last few days is that Statscan is A-OK with this,” the Globe’s Steven Chase had said to Clement. “Right,” Clement responded, “and I do assert that. When an agency of government reports to its minister and gives that minister options, I am entitled to assume that they are comfortable with those options.”
That afternoon, Sheikh wrote his resignation letter. “I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion,” he wrote soon afterward to Statscan staff, “the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census. It cannot.”
The Globe, which was having a pretty good July 21 thanks to Clement and Sheikh, ended the day with a story on the bureaucrat’s resignation. Sheikh’s departure “threatens to deal a fatal blow to Conservative efforts to sell their census changes,” the story said.
And indeed, pretty soon this was the consensus among the makers of consensus. “Canadians are confronted by the spectacle of a wounded prime minister leading a gang that can’t shoot straight,” James Travers wrote in the Star.
“Having lost the argument,” former Mulroney speech writer L. Ian Macdonald wrote in the Gazette, “the government should be looking for a way out, for some kind of Canadian compromise.”
On August 12, six weeks after the controversy began, Charles W. Moore surveyed the wreckage in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. “I’ve been mystified by Stephen Harper’s willingness to squander so much political capital on an issue as trivial as the long-form census,” he wrote. “Only slightly less so by the media’s piling on, treating this as a matter of great national importance, and by the level of emotional investment so many apparently attach to census-gathering. I don’t get it. It’s just not that big a deal either way.”
What few observers had done during the whole business was to investigate why Harper might have bothered. Those who did look would have found a deep vein of census mistrust among conservatives in Canada and outside, reaching back many decades. They might then have understood that this was a very big deal for Harper, and, as a result, for his opponents too.
Even as Harper was seeking to eliminate the mandatory long-form census, the Republican National Committee was calling for an end to the long form’s U.S. equivalent, the American Community Survey. The RNC passed a resolution saying the U.S. Census Bureau behaved “exactly as a scam artist would, asking very personal questions,” and spending “millions of tax dollars to violate the rights and invade the personal privacy of United States citizens.” A divided Congress and a Democratic president made it hard for the GOP to get its way, so the issue has never died in the U.S. In May 2013, a Tea Party congressman from South Carolina, Jeff Duncan, introduced a bill that would eliminate all data collection by the Census Bureau except for a decennial population count.
Duncan and the latter-day Republicans spring from a rich heritage. In 1977 Ronald Reagan, then preparing for his second run at the presidency, devoted one of his daily radio broadcasts to census excesses. There was no justification for the questions these “snoops” were asking, Reagan told his audience. “They are invading our privacy under threat of punishment if one says it’s none of their business. And it is none of their business.”
Reagan didn’t invent census suspicion. It has popped up, in one way or another, every time a government has sought to count its citizenry. In 1940, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, Charles W. Tobey, led a nationwide protest movement against Franklin W. Roosevelt’s plan to run the most elaborate census yet. There was a war on. America wasn’t yet in it. Tobey correctly suspected Roosevelt of wavering in his resolve to keep the country on the sidelines, and he was pretty sure the census was designed to smoke out draft-worthy young men. “Many people are writing to me they are forming local anti-snooping clubs,” Tobey told the New York Times. If FDR insisted on “this snooping campaign,” he continued, “there won’t be jails enough to hold the people who will have the courage to cry ‘Hold! Enough!’ ”
The obvious counter-argument—that census data allows the thoughtful construction of public policy that properly reflects the contours of a complex society—is often of little interest to the person who greets a stranger knocking at the door. Such a character made a brief appearance in the world of art as Wash Hogwallop’s gun-toting son in the Coen brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? The kid squeezes off a couple of shotgun blasts at George Clooney and his associates as they approach the Hogwallop residence. The shots miss, but the boy is proud to announce he had better luck with an earlier visitor: “I nicked the census man!”
Nor was suspicion about the census high only among American conservatives. In 1981, as the first United Kingdom census during her tenure as prime minister approached, Margaret Thatcher summoned the head of the U.K. census office and the minister responsible for the census, Patrick Jenkin. She proceeded to grill both men on every line of the census form.
“She demanded to know why each question needed to be asked,” Jenkin wrote later. “She struck out several questions as too intrusive; she reluctantly accepted that others should remain in, even though they, too, seemed to seek very personal information. Throughout the discussion, she saw the exercise from the point of view of the citizen, not the bureaucracy.”
In Canadian political folklore, census suspicion is not a common feature, but it does make the occasional appearance. In the summer of 1996, when Harper was a young single-term Reform Party MP, George Jonas devoted four of his Toronto Sun columns to complaining about the census. “I find the whole concept of the modern census oppressive and offensive,” Jonas wrote. “By now the census has evolved from ordinary stock-taking on the part of the community to
a tool of government intrusion. It has come to be conducted with damnable arrogance and no regard for privacy.”
But “the worst thing” about the census, to Jonas, was not its manner but its aim. “By the government’s own admission, the census is used to foster plans of social engineering. This inevitably includes plans that a citizen may view as inimical to his private as well as to the public interest. (I certainly do. Over the years I’ve considered at least half of all government programs injurious both to my interests and the community’s.) Compelling people to provide information that may be used against them, personally or collectively, is unconscionable.”
This is the thread of argument that drove Harper to act. A list of thoughtful organizations as long as your arm tried to point out to him and his government that proper information has no ideology, that critiques of the state can be built on evidence just as the state was. Harper was uninterested. As I have been trying to tell you, at intervals throughout: Harper has more than a conservative analysis or a Conservative label: he has a conservative gut and he pays it some attention. Thatcher and Reagan and Jonas didn’t like the census. That was all Harper needed. And he was not alone. I first heard of the Conservatives’ concerns with the census in 2007, when a public servant mentioned to me that Maxime Bernier was “horrified” to learn that as industry minister in the first months after the 2006 election, he was in charge of Statistics Canada. Why was this horrifying? “Because to him, Statscan asks intrusive questions and then governments use the answers to build intrusive programs.”
With this, Jonas and Bernier probably got closer to the real reason for ransacking Statistics Canada than did Reagan and Thatcher. The problem, from Harper’s perspective, is not that people from the government were poking into people’s lives with questions. It is that they would eventually return with answers—in the form of big, complex, tax-sucking programs that would limit Canadians’ ability to lead their lives as they liked. It’s worth noting that in the United States, one of the most consistent loci of census suspicion has been associations of parents who home-school their children. Some of those parents worry the state will come and take their children away. They would prefer the state knew as little as possible about them.