WW II veteran Audrey Tobias, census objector, in court today

This should NEVER have reached a court. Some Stats-Can incompetent needs to go to re-education camp, out in the desert.

Given that so many Canadians side with the Democrats down here in the arguments about Obamacare being 'settled law' I imagine that you'll find yourself in the minority. It would follow that these same statists would throw their grandmothers into a wood chipper if Parliament passed a law saying that this was supposed to happen.

Look at my signature for the quote from Stanley Milgram. He noted an unusual component of the Canadian character was to comply with authority even in circumstances where such compliance would cause the (perceived) death of an unseen individual.

Don't get me wrong, Milgram's experiments showed that most Americans would have made acceptable guards at German death camps but he also noted that Americans were more likely to defy authority on moral grounds than were Europeans or Canadians.

His studies were and remain controversial because the results have been shown to be repeatable in other studies and because those results lay bare some uncomfortable truths about human nature and the dangers of blind compliance with authority.

In the case of this woman all that should occur here is a bit of common sense where a census worker could fill in the form on her behalf and be done with it. The US Census Bureau permits their workers to do the same because every ten years there's several million people who refuse to fill out those forms.

Reductio ad absurdum

Given the NSA's activities recently revealed, is it so absurd that this lady didn't want her information being given freely to the largest US Defence contractor?

And the Census worker I spoke to in 2003 and 2006 was more than happy to take the vital statistics of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

The absurdity lies not in the woman's beliefs but in Bart equating the requirement to take the census with German death camps or granny-grinding laws.

Read up on Stanley Milgram. His work noted that people who are willing to comply with authority simply for the sake of complying with authority are inclined to do some damnable things.

And it's not a 'reductio ad absurdium' as Milgrams' work has stood decades of scrutiny.

Given the NSA's activities recently revealed, is it so absurd that this lady didn't want her information being given freely to the largest US Defence contractor?

And the Census worker I spoke to in 2003 and 2006 was more than happy to take the vital statistics of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

In 2010 I put my cockatiel on the Census to see if they really did keep the information confidential. They don't. He started getting all sorts of junk mail about six months after the Census was completed.

Edit: I listed my cockatiel's race as 'Australian Native'.

The part I find funny is that the census doesn't need full compliance to be accurate enough to make useful demographic statistics, that's basic statistics.

The law is the law and I can't think of any constitutional reasons it wouldn't be a valid law.

IIRC some talk in the CCP about making the census voluntary?

Already done. The 'long form' census doesn't exist, replaced with the voluntary 'Household Survey'. And we're seeing the crap coming out of that now.

Just stating for the record that the lady is not protesting the census or even the mandatory compliance requirement.

She is a pacifist protesting the fact that Haper gov has outsourced the census to arms maker Lockheed Martin.

Wonder if that changes anyone's views.

Her trying to state that she is a pacifist, and that Lockheed Martin is a defense contractor as a reason for her refusal is shaky at best. Many people tried that line of reasoning to avoid paying taxes during the Afgan/ Iraq conflicts. You can't start spitting hairs like that. Pacifists still had to pay taxes to support a war they did not support. Once you open that gate, everyone has something they object too.

Now had she said that we Americans seem to have an obsession with spying on everyone under the sun, and she does not want any of her info being fed into an American based software system, than I would say she would have a very valid point indeed. Everything about this census, (from collection to analysis) should be 100% Canadian controlled. The people collecting the data, the people compiling the info, the software used, etc. Six months ago, anyone saying what I am now saying, I would have called a tin hatter. That was before Edward Snowden. Now that we know how little privacy we actually have, I don't blame Miss Tobias for not wanting to share her info, albeit for different reasons than the one she is stating.

Just shut up and hand over that marble rye, ya old bag.

Ok so let me see if I have this straight. Our CANADIAN census information is actually collected by a foreign firm. Not just that, but a foreign firm whose primary source of business is developing and building military aircraft.

Is this a national 'Just for Laughs, GAGS' bit

Please, someone tell me it is.