Lies and nothing but the lies.... Intentially misleading Canadians

Canada’s globally admired statisticians undercut: Goar

Auditor general’s report provides a first look at the damage the Harper government has done by hacking Statistics Canada.

For the past year, Canadians have laboured under the misapprehension that thousands of jobs go begging because no one in this country has the skills to fill them. It turned out the government was using faulty online data.
 

For two years, people struggled to figure out how Ottawa could close prisons while ordering judges to impose more jail sentences. The auditor general solved that riddle last week: it couldn’t. Canada’s prisons are dangerously overcrowded. “There is no link between the rate of violence and double-bunking,” Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney now says.
 

For eight years, the government has been cracking down on lawlessness, despite a steady drop in the crime rate. Former cabinet minister Stockwell Day insisted “unreported crime” was rising.
 

Through three federal elections, Stephen Harper has campaigned as the prime minister who brought fiscal discipline to the nation’s capital. In fact, federal spending ballooned on his watch. He burned his way through the $13-billion surplus left by the previous government, leaving no rainy-day fund when the 2008 recession hit. That meant he had to run the largest deficit in Canadian history. Only since 2012 have the Tories practised government-wide restraint.
 

Two things are noteworthy about this pattern of disinformation.
 

One is that it has lasted so long. Until recently there was no systematic questioning of the “facts” dispensed by Harper and his associates.
 

The other is that it is locked in. The Tories have downsized Statistics Canada, the country’s chief information gathering agency, so severely that future governments will have to rely on blunt — and sometimes unreliable — tools to monitor socio-economic developments.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/05/19/canadas_globally_admired_statisticians_undercut_goar.html