Once upon a time, Statistics Canada , “Statscan”, was a neutral purveyor of quantifiable facts. Much like meteorologists who record and relay metrics that describe past weather events. Or seismologists who measure the potency and number of earth tremors. Or football statisticians who record the number net yards each team gained or lost in the game, or the percentage of pass completions that each quarterback achieved.
That is what they do. That is their mandate. Or was.
But Statscan has apparently taken on an additional role. They are now an advocacy group. They not only tell us that we are having a government induced population boom, but they are celebrating it. They have blown their cover. They have revealed themselves as full-fledged members of Team Exponential Growth, another singer in the choir which touts the benefits of increasing ethnic fragmentation, mega-cities, urban densification, roads punched through intact wilderness to access resources and on-going global integration which will finish off any remaining sense of Canada as a sovereign nation-state.
Madeline Weld, the President of the Population Institute of Canada put it thusly :
On June 16, Statistics Canada issued a press release with a video about Canada’s population reaching 40 million on June 16. It is certainly cause for celebration, says StatsCan (which used to be a respectable organization).
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/subjects-start/population_and_demography/40-million
Does the video (2:35 minutes) look to anyone else like a propaganda piece by the Century Initiative (a lobby group pushing for 100 million Canadians by 2100) or maybe a cabal of developers? A hodge-podge overview of history with an incessant promo of immigration. Each new million from the mid-30s on is excitedly announced like a countdown to New Year’s. So wonderful that immigration is making up for our low birthrate. Canada’s 2.7% growth in 2022 (which outpaced Africa’s measly 2.4%) is 96% due to immigration.
What’s not to like? I’m embarrassed that a once respected government department came up with this brazen piece of propaganda. Did they invoke the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl?
And that chief statistician doofus at the end who doesn’t give his name but says what an exciting milestone this is and how excited he is to be living in a time of change and about what the future may bring. I’m also pretty excited about what the future may bring but not quite in the same way that he is.
Statscan is treating runaway population growth in the way that government politicians would want us to treat it. As an unmitigated blessing . An achievement. Proof positive that our nation is a place worth moving to. “See, migrants are voting with their feet”. It is a plebiscite on the wise stewardship of our government. And Statscan is waving the numbers like a banner. In other words, they have essentially become a public relations arm of the government. A political player. Or in the parlance of American political pundits, Statscan has become “weaponized”.
Think about it.
Football statisticians do not brandish game statisticians to laud or denounce the performance of teams or players. They do not register their approval or disapproval, they simply report their findings. This quarterback was sacked 3 times and completed 20% of his attempted throws. His counterpart was sacked once and completed 60% of his passes. Post-mortem commentators can take it from there.
Seismologists report earthquakes and their ranking in the Richter scale. But they don’t express glee at their occurrence.
And meteorologists don’t record their feelings about weather events. They do not, for example, congratulate Vancouver or its residents for experiencing mild winter temperatures or racking up 20 hours of sunshine in March. They understand that they were not hired to be cheerleaders. They are not arms of the Tourist Bureau or the Chamber of Commerce. Reporting cold and wet weather may dissuade tourists from coming to the city, but if it was cold and wet, let the chips fall where they may.
Promoting tourism is not what Environment Canada weather reporters are in business for. And they know it. That is precisely why we respect their data.
Statscan may not long enjoy the same reception.
The conscription of Statscan in the service of boosterism carries the risk that its statistics may come to be received with skepticism — or dismissed in the same fashion that the results of “push” polls commissioned by political actors are treated with a kilo of salt. When the statistics fashioned by partisan interests prove unreliable, they are disregarded. Instead of looking at polling results, skeptics first attempt to find out who paid for it. And polling firms associated with one political party are more apt to be discounted.
Selective or sculptured statistics can scuttle a cause. In the Battle of Britain, Herman Goering was assured that the RAF was on the brink of collapse. But their casualties were inflated by wishful thinkers who based their conclusions on exaggerated claims. If Statscan has skin in the game, its credibility will diminish as severely as the credibility of growth-o-holic politicians who argue that they can solve the housing crisis by importing a half million home-seekers a year, or raise the standard of living by importing cheap labour in massive numbers. Or planners who tell us that they are “optimistic” that their projected growth numbers will pan out. “Vancouver is evolving into an international urban hub worthy of equivalent stature to the greatest cities and conurbations of the world”. In other words, an unlivable rat-race where residents who oppose density are derided as selfish relics of nimby-ism, while those who have been priced out of the market must live in veritable shoe-boxes , or seek shelter in tents in local parks or lie on sidewalks. A lot of us wanted no part of their “world-class city” and got out. We are the lucky ones. Others feel trapped.
Covid was a game-changer. A wake-up call. And a catalyst for a mental transformation that was long in
coming.
In the three year panic-demic many of us came to realize that there are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and Covid statistics. Canadians learned that there are several kinds of liars, including the kind they had been genetically predisposed to trust. Government. Canadians are a credulous breed who possess a naïve trust in authority and the credibility of their taxpayer-funded state broadcaster, the CBC. But like the wife who discovered her loyal husband of 20 years had been cheating on her for some time, a lot of Canadians, have had a rude awakening. Independent thought and research comes at a heavy price. Disillusionment and ostracism. A Great Divide now runs like a fault line through families and friends.
Things have changed, and they are still changing. More and more Canadians are turning away from “the boob tube” and the legacy media and streaming a much broader spectrum of news sources. That is why the NDP-Liberal alliance and its leaders have been so desperate to bring in much tighter and more intrusive online censorship laws. They are afraid of the truth getting out.
Of course, for them, anything critical of their narrative is not the truth, but “harmful misinformation”. Many other institutions are following suite, like the various provincial colleges of Physicians and Surgeons—the Pimps of Big Pharma—who have punished dissenting doctors who dared to impart the knowledge they gained from treating patients. Laymen exposed to a modicum of alternative information are confused. The common refrain now is, “I don’t know what or who to believe anymore”.
Want to know why more and more people are embracing libertarian perspectives? Because the light bulb finally came on. Governments lie. Especially their anointed medical experts! Statscan may be next
on the list.
What can be said of Statscan has been said of the CBC. The lies they tell are primarily lies of omission. It is not so much what they report but what they choose not to report, If Statscan wants to tell us that immigration-driven population growth is correlated with a higher GDP, fine. But it must also tell us that it is not necessarily correlated with a rise in per capita GDP. That is the metric that matters.
If bigger is better, prove it. Lets see the numbers. All of them.
