About This Site
So who's behind all this? Short answer: a bunch of Canadians who got fed up.
Back in 2006, word got out that Statistics Canada had handed a chunk of the census work to a Lockheed Martin subsidiary. Yes, that Lockheed Martin. The weapons company. The one with the Pentagon contracts and a long history of, shall we say, creative bookkeeping.
We thought it was a joke at first. It wasn't.
Why We Care
Census data isn't just numbers. It's your name, your address, your income, your family, your language, your religion, sometimes your health. That's a lot of trust to hand over. And handing it to a foreign defence contractor - under a free trade deal, no less - doesn't sit right with a lot of people.
StatsCan keeps saying the data is safe. That Lockheed only touched the software and the hardware, not the actual answers. Maybe. But we've seen enough "secure" systems get cracked, lost, or left on a subway car to not take that at face value.
What We're Not
We're not against counting people. A country needs to know how many of us there are, where we live, what we need. Fine.
We're not telling you to break the law either. That's your call. Some people refuse outright and take the consequences. Others go for what we call minimum cooperation - answer what you have to, skip what you can, don't volunteer anything extra.
What we are against is the quiet outsourcing of private citizen data to a foreign military contractor and the assumption that we should all just shrug and go along with it.
Who Runs This
This site started as a volunteer project. No funding, no party affiliation, no corporate backers. Just people who read the news, got angry, and put up a website.
Over the years we've collected news items, court cases, tips from census workers, and a few good cartoons. You'll find most of it in the sidebar. If you've got something to add, use the contact page.
And if you're wondering whether your voice matters - in 2011, roughly two million Canadians didn't fill out the census. Nobody went to jail over it. So yeah. It matters.