Maple Leaf BushCo: The nonstop lies of Stephen Harper's government

[marmar]

from CBC News:




An Industry Canada employee questioned Conservative MP Maxime Bernier's claims in July that as minister he received about 1,000 complaints a day about the mandatory long-form census, internal documents obtained by CBC News show.

The former industry minister, now a Conservative backbencher, said in July of this year that he was blitzed by complaints when he oversaw the 2006 census as minister.

However, in a July 18 email found among documents obtained by CBC News through an access-to-information request, ministry employee Paul Halucha asked a high-ranking official at Statistics Canada whether the agency had any numbers to back up Bernier's statement.

Industry Canada's "internal survey of correspondence did not show anything close to a thousand a day," he wrote to Statistics Canada's Connie Graziadei, adding in brackets "we got a standard 25-30 a year."

The documents suggest officials inside the ministry responsible for the census were themselves caught flat-footed by Bernier's contention that the government had been inundated with complaints over the 2006 survey.

According to the documents, Graziadei replied with a breakdown of the 882 complaints Statistics Canada received for the 2006 short- and long-form census, which included 332 complaints about a contract the agency awarded to Lockheed-Martin for census data collection. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/10/04/census-bernier-complaints-documents.html#ixzz11Qttz0SG

[applegrove]

1. I hope the back bencher who put forward the "reversal" wins. That'll teach

harper to be an idealogue.

[Lucy Goosey]

2. I'm still surprised Harper misred the census issue so badly...

I really don't think the Conservatives expected the backlash, but they should have. Of course it was going to be seen as ideological! It feels like some sort of tea party, "small government", American issue, and Canadians noticed. (And they didn't do them selves any favours in that regard with the gun registry issue.)

The Harpercons are such a fucking embarassment...