More importantly, the public outcry and your emails have prompted Chief Statistician of Canada Ivan Fellegi to send out a response to Canadians via email. Unfortunately, his response does not yet address the concerns Canadians have about their privacy and the ethics of using a military contractor to do our census--nor does it remedy the larger problem of the trade agreements that force us to allow U.S. companies to bid on contracts like this on equal footing with Canadian companies.
Nor have we heard from Industry Minister Allan Rock on this issue.
Rest assured that Vive le Canada.ca will continue to work to highlight this issue, and the email form that allows you to pass your comments along to the government will remain up and running until the final decision on the 2006 census contract is made (which should be sometime in 2004). If you haven't sent your email yet, please visit Lockheed Martin and the Canadian census. Vive will also work to organize a boycott should the consortium lead by Lockheed-Martin indeed get that contract.
Be sure to visit Vive le Canada.ca for more updates. Or sign up for our Take Action! mailing list to have the latest information delivered directly to your inbox.
Thanks again for your support. With your help, we are making a difference!
- Susan Thompson
Vive le Canada
[I have also posted this to the comments section of the action itself]
Note: related action
response
Lockheed Martin and the...
Take Action! mailing list
Stumble It!
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Dave Ruston
Our office in Vancouver used to have its own director, but we were just taken over by the Edmonton office, whose director has a reputation as a tyrant. We found out first hand this was true. He just fired 40 workers, some who had been with the company for 3 years. The reason given was lack of work (the survey they had been working on was ending). But past practice has been for the productive, experienced workers to be given work on other surveys. Instead they were let go, and workers who had been with us only 3-5 months (and when the new director took over from Edmonton he hired a ton of these--they get no benefits and are on lower pay scale) were maintained on the other surveys.
Our current inhouse union president was among those fired. Real 19th century stuff, and all because we are ready to strike for what is fair. Jim Sinclair, the head of the B.C. Federation of Labour was at our rally today and said we should hold our heads up and not crawl into our office like the Edmonton director wants us to.
The Edmonton director also said in a meeting he was prepared to use non-union workers to do collect the information used for the unemployment rate, the consumer price index etc.--all the timely stats Statcan needs to get out.
Anyways, that\'s the situation in Statcan. I wouldn\'t trust anything Ivan Fellegi says. About three years ago he fired two workers in our office because he said they made critical mistakes on one of the surveys. Again one of these workers had been with us for at least a year. The two workers got a lawyer and won a wrongful dismissal suit against him, won a cash settlement and had the dismissal stricken from their records. The mistake was in how Statcan original wrote the survey, not the interviewers who were reading it. The point is, these people don\'t care who takes the fall, just as long as it isn\'t them.
Does the figure 50% ring any bells?
If, as a disgruntled employee, you\'re going to clutter up a serious discussion with self-serving propaganda, at least be prepared to tell the whole story...
This is an assault on public values across all fronts. Surely this is not the Canada we built in the twentieth century with a strong federal government, civil servants Canadians trusted (the \"mandarins\") and rising wages for everyone. We have to take a long hard look at why real prosperity in this country has stalled.
Investors (those who wrote NAFTA, the WTO and veto our policies by attacking our dollar) want a low-growth, low-inflation (i.e. high unemployment, stagnant wage) regime to control volatility in their stock and bond portfolios.
We can start by forcing the federal government to cancel the Lockheed Martin contract. Maybe they\'ll get the message. And maybe they\'ll treat the Canadians who work for them better.