Census forms and personal identification stolen in Surrey, B.C.

Just out of curiosity: are they reporting in the Surrey, B.C. news that completed census forms from 2006 were stolen by identity thieves? They are in Montreal. Through the access to information law, reporters recently learned a lot more was stolen too: credit cards, undelivered mail, card readers, debit machines, drivers licenses, government cheques, counterfeiting equipment and CDs containing thousands of personal profiles. The RCMP insist that the people arrested were not employees of Statistics Canada nor of Canada Post — they stole all of this stuff by knocking over mail boxes and breaking into homes or cars. We will have to take their word for it.

Nobody is required to vote but everybody is legally required to fill out census forms. So, now that you know your personal information is not safe, should that change how you respond? I think you should. [Even if your information was safe I think you should reconsider how you respond anyway. Did you know that Lockheed Martin got the contract for this last census and the next one?] Your single vote makes no difference to the result of an election but census data is often used more directly when it comes to the allocation of funding for various government interventions — for instance, public schooling. Just think of this: sympathizers of various groups or social causes can lie to deliberately skew the data even if they are not part of those demographics themselves.

Whether they are identity thieves or policy makers, you really have no idea who has access to this census data and what they do with it.