StatCan’s ideological snooping
Recently it was revealed that Statistics Canada sought to obtain the private banking information of half a million Canadians without their knowledge or consent. Jennifer Robson, professor of political management at Carleton University, in an interview with the CBC, justified the data sweep on the grounds that governments need this information to make good policy. But don’t be concerned, she said, it is not for ideological purposes, since StatCan is ideologically neutral. That made me laugh. The very idea of policy based on data reflects an instrumentalist belief that governments should solve social problems by political means. That requires an ideological confidence in the administrative state, to which StatCan is a handmaiden.
Ideology is not a dirty word. An ideology is merely a worldview, a lens through which to perceive society. Political parties, by definition, each have one (and sometimes extra ones for special occasions). But it is another thing for a public agency to act independently in furtherance of its own ideology while pretending to be neutral.
The StatCan deep dive into banking records — presently on hold while federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien investigates its legality — appears not to have been directed by government officials but was undertaken on StatCan’s own initiative. The agency’s decision is consistent with a conviction that the more personal data available to government, the better off we will be; that governments are benevolent; that private financial matters call for public policy management; and that a bigger government is a better government. A commitment to social policy, wrote Milton Friedman “involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scare resources to alternative uses.”
Friedman was referring to the belief, now dominant in Western nations, that laws and policies are to be used as means to an end — the instrumentalist conviction that it is the job of the state to identify desirable social outcomes and then fashion policies to achieve them. If that proposition sounds unremarkable, it is because the modern administrative welfare state now dominates our lives. If the purpose of the state is not to solve social problems, then what is it for?
The question has an answer: The state’s role is to establish the general rules that apply to all, which then produce outcomes on their own whatever they may be. One of the core propositions of the Western ideal of the rule of law is that everyone, even the government, is subject to the same laws and standards, which the government is not to arbitrarily finagle every time a new political problem arises. In the Canadian legal universe, the rule of law lives alongside instrumentalist social policy, but they are actually incompatible. Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University School of Law, writes that while both the rule of law and instrumentalism are taken for granted, “it is seldom recognized that the combination of these two ideas is a unique historical development of relatively recent provenance and that, in certain crucial respects, they are a mismatched pair.”
What is to prevail? In the recent Munk Debate in Toronto, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump, outlined the three pillars of the Trump doctrine: economic nationalism, America-first international relations, and deconstruction of the administrative state. It is the last of these three that irks publicservice insiders the most, for it places in question the legitimacy of their endeavours. The ideological dispute is not just about the content of government policy but also whether we need so much of it or any of it. That question applies equally to Canada as it does to the United States.
When the Harper government cancelled the mandatory long-form census in 2010 (since reinstated by the Trudeau Liberals), StatCan’s chief statistician Munir Sheikh resigned in protest. StatCan is not now actively partisan but it does not need to be. All the parties in the House of Commons, with the possible exception of Maxime Bernier’s fledgling People’s Party, share its ideological persuasion that governments should design policies that subsidize desirable initiatives, protect important interests, manage social outcomes and provide support to certain elements of the populace.
The development of such policies requires a rich supply of data, which in the view of StatCan apparently outweighs the privacy of individual Canadians. The most insidious kind of ideology is the one that insists it is not ideology at all but the only reasonable way of looking at the world.
THE AGENCY’S DECISION IS CONSISTENT WITH A CONVICTION THAT BIGGER GOVERNMENT IS BETTER GOVERNMENT.