Census Derangement Syndrome
Getting irrational about counting people
Tomorrow – May 12 – is Census Day.
It’s a big day for me.
I’m a census buff. When the data starts to get released (it comes in tranches by subject area), I have the release dates entered on our wall calendar. My wife thinks this weird, but I get really excited by data releases. When I was teaching, I used census data a lot. Now that I’m retired, I’m quite possibly the biggest recreational user of census data in Canada.
Helping with the census is pretty simple.
Your household should have received a yellow card/envelope with an identifier number. If you have not done it yet, someone in the household has to log into Statistics Canada’s census portal and enter the number. You’ll then need to answer some questions. Four of five households receive the “short form” census. This takes less than five minutes to complete, if that. One fifth of households get the “long form” which has more questions. It takes about half hour to forty minutes to complete.
If you don’t complete the census, someone will show up at your door to ask the questions, so my advice is just do the thing. Don’t procrastinate. Just do it.
It’s not that hard these days. A couple of millennia ago, a carpenter named Joseph and his wife Mary had to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem to complete an early census. It was about 160 km, which was a long way to travel before the car was invented – particularly since Mary was nine months pregnant.
If Joseph and Mary could do it, you can too. It’s a lot easier today.
But as census day approaches, I’ve been noticing something weird on social media. There seem to be a disturbing number of Canadians suffering from census derangement syndrome.
I’ve seen on-line rants about the census as an invasion of privacy. I’ll just note that someone who spends a lot time commenting on social media shouldn’t be worried about their privacy since it’s already been given away.
I’ve seen some people post pictures of their census card marked up with ranting obscenities and marked “return to sender. I’ve also seen some people write 500-word instructions on what to say to census takers to avoid answering questions.
This is weird. It’s stupider than road rage, although not as dangerous. But there are consequences to not responding to the census.
The government actually needs information about Canadians in order to make informed policy decisions. If government cannot collect this information – basic stuff like how many people there are in Canada – government becomes more stupid than it already is.
Another observation:
This might simply a function of the feeds I get because of social media algorithms, but most of the people exhibiting census derangement syndrome seem to be coming from Alberta. Refusing to participate in the census is being described as an act of resistance to a federal government that ignores and denigrates Alberta.
But here is the thing. One of the core purposes of the census is to count how many people live in each province. This determines how many seats each province gets in Parliament. If people in one province boycott the census, they will get fewer seats in Parliament. If that’s what they want – fine. But I then don’t want to hear whining and complaining about a lack of political influence.
Now – most people cooperate with the census. Most who don’t those who start as procrastinators who then suffer from forgetfulness. Fair enough.
But there is a group out there who suffer from census derangement syndrome. I don’t know how many belong to this group, but they are making their presence felt on social media.
I’m going to be blunt.
If you are someone getting this worked up about the census, you’ve become deranged. Please seek help from a mental health professional. Seriously. You need help.
That’s my rant about the census refusal syndrome I’ve been seeing on social media.
But I also want to recall a different type of census derangement syndrome a decade and a half ago.
Before moving on to the second type of census derangement syndrome, I want to touch base on another reason for census refusal that I’ve been hearing about in face-to-face conversations rather than on the social media.
This is narcissistic self-centeredness. Let’s call it a personality disorder rather than manifestation of mental illness. It’s a kind of bored, disengaged selfishness rather than a mental health issue, per se. Instead, it is a manifestation of a decay in our social cohesion.
Quite simply, this takes the form of “I can’t be bothered” or “what’s in it for me?” rather than an active, hostile refusal on some weird point of principle.
For a country or society to function, people have responsibilities as well as rights. We must put in as well as take out. When someone “doesn’t bother” to fulfil a social obligation as infinitesimally small as filling out the census, they’ve become a social parasite.
Here’s the thing about parasites. Enough of them can kill an organism. Enough social parasites can destroy the functioning of a society.
In Dr. Zivago, the half-brother to the doctor saw his brother knocking over a fence to steal some firewood. Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago observed that “one desperate man stealing wood is a pathetic sight. A million of them can destroy a city.”
Failure to meet tiny obligations of a functioning society is a form of firewood stealing - but without the moral justification of being cold.
The Academic/Activist Census Derangement Syndrome of 2011
It is against the law to refuse to complete the census. In theory, you could get fined $500 for your refusal. Even more theoretically, you could go to jail for three months.
Now, the chances of this happening are remote.
In 2021, Statistics Canada banged (electronically or in person) on the doors of almost 15 million households. When the dust settled, it reported a 98 percent completion rate. That means that about 60,000 households did not complete the census. For the 98 percent of complying households, there were an average of 2.4 people per household. This means that about 144,000 people did not complete the census.
According to Statistics Canada, 43 people were charged with non-completion. That means about 0.02986 percent of those who refused to complete the census were charged.
That’s why I said you could “theoretically” get fined or go to jail for refusal. It’s a paper threat. Our legal system could not process the volume if there was anything approaching real enforcement of the law.
Going into the 2011 census, the Harper government decided to restrict the use of unenforceable threats. It believed that threatening the recalcitrant with unenforceable fines or jails just makes them more recalcitrant. As a result, two changes were made to the census:
For those getting the “long form” census, the threat of fines or jail was removed. Participation in the “long form” became voluntary. People were still legally compelled to complete the short form census.
The sample size of the detailed long form document was increased from one in five households to one in three.
The result was a larger sample, but one that was less rigorously randomized. If those refusing to complete the long form were correlated with specific demographic groups, those groups would be underreported in the results.
That was the policy decision made by the Harper government. It was arguable but defensible.
But holy crap. The pointy heads went nuts.
It was asserted that without the threat of fines or jail, the results of the census would be useless. Academics vowed to refuse to use the results of the census in their research. They asserted that without threatening to throw people in jail, the ability of the government to engage in “evidence based” decision making would be impossible. It was an attack on science itself.
In the 2015 election, the Liberals promised – in their platform – to reinstate the fines and imprisonment for refusal to complete the long form census. While attacking the Conservatives for being “tough on crime” by increasing penalties for drug dealers and child molesters, the Liberals promised to get tough on census refuseniks. Priorities are revealing.
The Liberals won the election. The commitment to get draconian on census violators was a rare promise that Trudeau actually kept. The threat of fines and jail was reimposed in time for the 2016 census. That year, a total of 47 people were charged for census refusal, but it is unclear whether these were charges for refusing to complete the long form or the short form. (In 2011, 54 people were charged with refusing to complete the short form.)
When the 2011 data was released, I was back at university as a graduate student. I contacted about a dozen of the most prominent academics who had attacked the removal the possibility of fines/jail for refusing to complete the long form. I asked if they were conducting any analysis of the actual effect on census findings (there are statistical techniques and comparisons that could be used). About half did not respond. The other half haughtily told me that no such analysis was necessary since they KNEW the findings were tainted.
“So much for evidence-based decision making,” I thought.
I’ve looked at what Statistics Canada had to say on the matter. The only suggestion of an anomaly that I’ve been able to find is that recent immigrants from some countries appear to have under-participated.
That appears to be it.
This whole kerfuffle over the imposition of fines or jail for census refusal also seems to me to be an example of census derangement syndrome. It manifested itself differently than the refuseniks but was just as stupid. The pointy heads asserted that without the threat of jail, the results of the census would be useless. Then they refused to analyze the data to see if their predictions were fulfilled. What’s more, the protests ignored the fact that the threat of prosecution is an idle one. Almost nobody gets prosecuted.
My experience on the doorstep
I worked for Statistics Canada during the 2021 census. I was given a list of addresses where the census had not been completed. I’d arrive at their doorstep and – if I ever caught them home – would run through the questions. Almost everyone fell into the procrastinating forgetfulness category. No threats were needed to get compliance. Just a reminder in the form of someone on their doorstep.
I only met two refuseniks.
One was just an asshole. He screamed at me for about fifteen minutes about Justin Trudeau. Not a fan. The worst thing was that he stood close and sprayed spittle in my face while he screamed. This was at the tail-end of COVID stuff. It was the only time I was happy to be wearing a mask. In any event, he concluded by claiming he’d already completed the census. Two things were clear to me (in addition to the fact that he was an asshole):
That he was lying about having completed the census, and
If I mentioned the possibility of fines or jail, he’d go completely berserk.
I just marked him down as claiming to have completed the thing and beat a retreat. I’ve got no idea what follow-up there was after that, but I suspect there was none. Not worth it.
The other guy was more entertaining. He was a guy in his late thirties with a British accent. He told me he moved to Canada about two years earlier. We had a nice chat about weather and suchlike. Then I asked him to answer the questions.
He refused. He took the position that he did not want to.
I replied, in a general way, that he had to answer. It was a legal requirement.
He continued to refuse. He argued that he had not been told this was a requirement when he immigrated to Canada. Because he had not been so informed, he claimed, he did not have to comply.
I asked him if he had a driver’s license. He did. I then asked if he had been specifically told one was needed to drive on Canadian roads.
With this, the guy conceded the “failure to specifically be notified when immigrating” argument was a loser. He reverted to the “it’s stupid, so I don’t want to” argument.
I asked him what he did in Britain before coming to Canada.
He told me he’d been in the army for ten years.
I asked him if – in ten years in the army – he had ever been given a stupid order by an officer.
He conceded that such a thing had happened from time to time.
I asked him what he had done when receiving a stupid order.
The guy started laughing. “I saluted and said ‘yes sir.’”
“Well then?” I asked. With that, he answered the questions.
My experience was that almost everyone will willingly do the census. Some might need a nudge or reminder, but folks are willing.
Of the two refuseniks I encountered, one was just an asshole. I suspect he had mental health problems. A personality disorder at the very least.
The other guy just enjoyed a good argument.
But a heavy-handed threat of fines or jails would have been profoundly useless in either case. Given that reality, I wonder why the social science academic community was so adamant about the need to threaten people to gain compliance.
I’ll also note that the sociologists and their ilk claimed that the removal of the threat of punishment would lead to an undercounting of the poor, indigenous people, and minorities. You’ll note that the two examples of refusal I encountered in 2021 both came from relatively affluent white males. The deranged posts I’ve seen on the social media are not coming the poor and oppressed. The cases of the narcissistic self-centered refusal that I’ve been hearing about are also coming from the relatively privileged. If the removal of the threat of punishment actually decreased response rates, we’d likely have an undercounting of assholes rather than an undercounting of the poor and oppressed. The assumption that it will be the poor and oppressed who are undercounted seems to be based on snobbery combined with moral preening disguised as virtue signaling.
The only explanation for the 2011 hysteria in the ivory towers that makes sense to me is that too many people with Ph.D.’s are authoritarians at heart who like the ability of being able to threaten people.
There seems to be at least two forms of census derangement syndrome out there. And one narcissist personality disorder. Statistics Canada reports that the response rate in past censuses has been just over 98 percent. If this completion rate goes down in 2026 - and I suspect it will - it will not be a good sign.