Murray Dobbin Says Count Me In To Census

The principal organizer and promoter of the boycott of the Census comes in the form of the website CountMeOut whose motto is “Empowering every Canadian to oppose NAFTA and deep integration through minimum co-operation” with the Census. The problem with this notion of empowerment and the call for minimal co-operation is it's just the wrong strategy, targeting the wrong agency. A successful boycott would have no impact whatever on Lockheed Martin but would hurt one of the most important government agencies we have working for us. Full article: http://rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?sh_itm=af394b30a5b04c5f8307209ab82c1974&rXn=1&; My response as sent May 9: Dear Murray, We've met before, I think through a Parkland Institute function on deep integration in Edmonton. I'm writing regarding your article "The Census? Count me in". I'm disappointed at the inaccuracies and errors in your article. I founded and run (along with a board of directors) Vive le Canada.ca, the organization that actually has been promoting and running a boycott regarding the census since 2003. While I respect CountMeOut.ca, CountMeOut.ca is not the organizer of a census boycott as written in your article, and was certainly not the architect of our slight victory regarding the census in 2003, ie the limitations on Lockheed Martin's involvement. That's not possible, you see, since CountMeOut.ca was founded only this year by Don Rogers and was not involved whatsoever in the original 2003 action boycotting the census test, which was run by us at Vive le Canada.ca. See our main action page, http://census.vivelecanada.ca For an explanation of the issue as we see it in detail see: http://www.vivelecanada.ca/staticpages/index.php/20060423184107361 For our timeline of our census actions from 2003-present see: http://www.vivelecanada.ca/staticpages/index.php/20040521190043619 For our email form letter see: http://census.vivelecanada.ca/letter.php You therefore convey the wrong impression when you say "CountMeOut — not satisfied with its share of the victory in changing the contract — now must rely on conspiracy theories to maintain its position that we should not co-operate with the Census" since you are crediting CountMeOut with a victory it had no part in, not existing at the time. And CountMeOut is not organizing a boycott but in fact only the minimum cooperation aspect of the campaign which is made clear on that website. At present, we at Vive are partnering with CountMeOut.ca--we are referring people to that site if they want to engage in minimum cooperation, and they are referring people to us if they want to fully boycott or send our editable email form letter to politicians protesting Lockheed Martin's involvement in the census. Therefore you are simply in error when you state that: The principal organizer and promoter of the boycott of the Census comes in the form of the website CountMeOut whose motto is “Empowering every Canadian to oppose NAFTA and deep integration through minimum co-operation” with the Census. I would very much like a retraction or correction to appear in Rabble stating the correct facts, which are that Vive le Canada.ca spearheaded the original 2003 boycott of the census test that led to Statistics Canada putting limitations on Lockheed Martin's involvement, and that Vive le Canada.ca remains the primary organizer of any actual boycott of the census and therefore it is Vive at the centre of that debate, partnering with CountMeOut.ca which is promoting minimum cooperation. Additionally, I would love to write an op-ed rebuttal to the article to be published on rabble. But for now I'll respond here. So on to the substance of your article. First of all, since Vive was the primary organizer of the original boycott and has been working on this issue since 2003, I can give you some information you have missed mentioning in your article. It's important to note that yes, we did successfully limit Lockheed Martin's involvement to ONLY the software, hardware, and printing of the census after they were originally involved in processing the census. However, AFTER StatCan told us that, CBC then found out that Lockheed Martin employees were still processing data. In response StatCan fired those employees (on a Friday)--but hired many back the very next business day (a Monday). Statistics Canada admitted this itself after other upset StatCan employees posted the information to our website, spinning it as allowing employees a fair chance to compete for the same jobs--but to us it looked like a big public relations exercise, which certainly was successful considering that these actions led both NDP MP Bill Blaikie and at least one news report to erroneously report that Lockheed Martin no longer had ANY involvement in the census, quickly quieting much of the outrage over the issue at the time. As you may guess, such actions make it difficult to continue to trust Statistics Canada's word on the safety of census information and the limitations of the contract. I am certainly glad that Statistics Canada has responded and limited the scope of the contract, and I certainly hope that our information is safe and secure. However, many Canadians remain concerned that it may not be and we share their concerns. We offer several examples of past cases with sources on our website of vital information being taken secretly by third-party contractors--one case involved US census information, taken by NASA even asfter assurances from the US census bureau that the information was secure, and one high-profile US case of airline records being taken even involved Lockheed itself. It may not happen in this case, but the question is whether we want to take the risk. And yes, as you allude to in the article, this issue certainly goes beyond privacy. Lockheed Martin is the world's largest military contractor, the prime beneficiary from not only the war in Iraq but missile defence and even private interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There is a moral repugnance and a stark inconsistency to paying a company, with taxpayer money, that not only benefits from but lobbied for so many of the the very U.S. policies that Canadians have rightly rejected. Since you can't criticize us on that front, you instead criticize us on strategy. You say we should not boycott the census because this will not hurt Lockheed Martin but Statistics Canada itself. Well, how do you propose we boycott Lockheed Martin? Most of us aren't in the market at present for a nuclear missile, and 80% of Lockheed's contracts are with the U.S. government--to successfully boycott Lockheed, we'd have to boycott the US government. Or, as in this case, unfortunately the Canadian government, and specifically Statistics Canada. I am no right-wing opposer of government in general, and understand and agree with the value of the statistics gathered by our own government agency. However, this is the sort of situation we face when we deal with the military-industrial complex--the military contractors become so enmeshed with government agencies that the line between the two blurs and disappears. In this particular case, what we are seeing is the encroachment of the U.S. military-industrial complex into Canada, and that is a large part of what makes it so odious. And we are opposing it with the only means at our disposal, a boycott of the census which Lockheed (and yes, IBM, the company that handled Holocaust statistics among other things) has been contracted to help run. All of the actions we offer make it abundantly clear that we are not demonizing Statistics Canada itself but only the fact that our generally respected and trusted government agency privatized in this manner, and with this particular company, which Canadians do not at all respect and trust. We offer information on the corporation and its past and present profile, not negative information on Statistics Canada. We ask people to boycott this particular census for these particular reasons, not any future census or statistics gathering in general. We are ultimately calling not for mistrust of government but for mistrust of the corporation that should not be doing government work in the first place, and people so far have generally not confused the two. What we are saying here is that yes, this information is vital and important--and that's precisely why it should be handled by Statistics Canada, or at least a Canadian company, not a U.S.-owned military contractor. That is why we have Statistics Canada employees themselves continuing to feed us information privately on this issue as they have since 2003, easily shown by the cases where we have had inside information published on our site that StatCan has later confirmed, again as listed in our timeline. And that said, frankly, as much as I'd like to believe that Vive le Canada.ca has the reach and ability to organize millions of Canadians into a boycott, the reality is that the number of people who engage in a full boycott will be statistically insignificant. 20? 50? 100? 1000? Out of millions. The vast majority will engage in any number of the other legal and easy alternatives we offer, not least of which is sending the email form letter we provide to government officials. The power of the boycott is not, after all, in wrecking the stats but in the attention it draws. A boycott is the riskiest, strongest and most outrageous action anyone can take, which is why we advocate it--it creates surprise and interest, and with interest comes publicity and with publicity comes the chance we can make this a national issue. If you really want to talk strategy. The more radical action taken by some also makes the less radical actions taken by others more acceptable and mainstream. Another strategy. The precious stats that we all rely on will still be there. But the action raises an outcry, and makes it possible that Lockheed Martin won't be, and that in future Statistics Canada won't contract out to that company or similar companies. As a result of the letters sent and the boycott the NDP has already raised this issue in the House of Commons and questioned why Lockheed is involved. Would that have happened had we remained silent? Would Lockheed's involvement been limited at all had we been silent in 2003? Simply, no. And of course we offer the boycott option because people requested it. We are a grassroots organization and we serve Canadians, we don't order them to do things. Several people were planning on boycotting and wanted support, which we knew because we are a platform where people can post their own thoughts and opinions rather than simply receive the daily missive from us on what to think. So we responded. Some of those people who boycott fully are sometimes doing so because that means they can rest fully assured that their information will not be at all seen or used by a military contractor, or any other unscrupulous body or person, because they are not offering it in the first place. Not one has questioned the need for Statistics Canada itself. Ultimately, we would not be in this situation had Statistics Canada not opened the contract to bid in the first place, which then meant that under the rules of NAFTA that American companies had to be treated exactly the same as Canadian companies, and likely easily underbid them due to its status as a multinational giant and the excellent profits the company has been raking in lately elsewhere, such as from the sale of its weapons for use in Iraq and its lead role in the development of the same missile defence system that so many activists in Canada and the US opposed. You yourself suggest we abrogate NAFTA, but yet argue against an action which is all about discussing this situation on a national scale as the example that it is of why NAFTA doesn't work. So I must conclude with my disappointment that you yourself, and also the CCPA, have continued to discount and discourage people from engaging in an action which has the potential to break the topic of deep integration, NAFTA, and the similarities/differences between Canadian and US policy into the mainstream national discussion. And I remain most disappointed because you have done this twice now (in the CCPA Monitor, and now in rabble) without even talking to us here at Vive about what we're doing and why--nor even, it seems, visiting the website. I hope that you will remedy that situation now, and I invite you to participate in our action by editing and sending our email to the federal government opposing Lockheed Martin's participation in the 2006 Canadian census. Since we also encourage people to write letters to the editor, I hope you will ask your own Word Warriors to raise the issue as well. Sincerely, Susan Thompson founder/president http://www.vivelecanada.ca PS Please also see our rebuttal of the CCPA Monitor articles at: http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20060429161934674 Best-selling author and Vive supporter Mel Hurtig has since also written the CCPA to complain about its support for the census.

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