Alan Broadbent writes What We Don’t Know:

"Data is back in fashion in Ottawa. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brings back Laurier’s “sunny ways,” one of the promised effects will be to infuse light into the data dark age of the Harper government’s suppression of data and information. While the Harper government’s killing of the long-form census was its most obvious and egregious attack on data, there were numerous others, such as putting out of business the National Council of Welfare and its statistical reports, which were critical to any understanding of poverty in Canada. The Harper people explained their actions as protecting privacy and saving money. Its critics dismissed these excuses, saying the data vandalism was an attempt to keep facts from spoiling the government’s storylines.

Is data truly back in Ottawa?"

Alan Broadbent is chair and co-founder of Maytree, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, and the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance. He is the author ofUrban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong(HarperCollins, 2010).

Read the rest of the article here: http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2017/03/what-we-dont-know/