I was looking forward to writing my monthly column about something other than federal politics this time around. Over the last few weeks, I've been more than irked about Industry Minister Tony Clement's misguided decision to scrap the long-form census. But there wasn't anything I could say that hasn't already been said by statisticians, columnists and people who rely on accurate data to plan policy.
But then on Tuesday, when attempting to justify spending billions on new prisons, Treasury Board President Stockwell Day had to go and outright say that statistics indicating crime rates in Canada are falling are not to be trusted. At the time, Day was facing questions from reporters after giving a speech on government austerity.
And I just can't let these two inanities pass without comment. Both of these decisions speak to the same fundamental problem with the governing party of the day: a total lack of desire to make evidence-based decisions. They prefer - we no longer need to say "it seems" - to make policy based on ideology rather than accurate information. In short, it's politics over policy.
Just to make sure I'm not crazy, I got in touch with one of my old criminology professors, Jane Sprott, now a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Day's argument was that crimes that go unreported are higher than ever before, and the government is simply responding to a demand from the public. But he had no evidence to back that up.
"There's no evidence for what he said. He just seemed to make that up. I think they're just grasping at straws for why they want to spend so much on prisons, and they're running out of explanations because there are no data available to suggest that if you put more people in prison, you will gain public safety," Sprott said.
While police-reported crime is just one piece of the overall puzzle, it tends to reflect the overall trend, Sprott said, and the majority of unreported crimes discovered through a survey done every five years are typically minor crimes that would not merit a prison sentence. The most recent data on unreported crimes that Day may have been referring to are now almost five years old.
Sprott said every Canadian political party has been known to advocate crime legislation that no research suggests will work, but she said it has been particularly frustrating dealing with the Conservatives.
"If you even say the word evidence, it's like you've used some four-letter word that everyone just cringes at. They really are hostile to any empirical data or evidence. Other governments have not been like that," Sprott said. "They just say 'we don't need the research. We know what needs to be done'."
The Conservatives quixotic belief that crime is something they can legislate away by making prison sentences longer and pouring billions into more prison infrastructure is robbing Canadians of tax dollars that could be spent on keeping people out of prison.
As for the census, let's change the name of Statistics Canada to the Department of Unfounded Hunches and Politically Con-venient Guesstimates, because without a mandatory, randomized, long-form census, that's basically what it will be.
Be it crime stats or the census, the Conservatives have shown only contempt for evidence-based policy making. Why? My guess is those stats and research tend to show results that don't make for a good political platform for them.
As faux-conservative political satirist Stephen Colbert has noted: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
