It may have lacked the marimba band and the fireworks, but barely. Excitement was palpable this week as citizens across Canada grasped their federal government forms in sweaty palms and raced to their computers.
Kim Kardashian may be dismayed, but in Canada we prefer to “break the Internet” when we rush online to fill out our census.
Apparently we’re such geeks that we enjoyed tweeting out our forms almost as much as we thrilled to the words “mandatory census.” Some folks voiced disappointment that they didn’t get the long form.
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertions to the contrary, apparently Canadians aren’t so wound up about privacy. (Psychologists might refer to this as “projecting.”) Of course anyone in the PMO who has checked Facebook lately would already be aware of this.
But Canadians instinctively know there’s a qualitative difference between posting cat videos and telling the feds who we really are. After a dismal decade of a fingers-stuck-in-ears approach to information gathering from Ottawa, we’ve just been itching to get it out.
One thing Canadians understand is that knowledge is power. Also, once you know something you can’t just ignore it. Which is why for the previous reality-averse administration, ignorance really was bliss.
It some ways it’s hard to imagine in this age of wide-net data mining there’s anything not known about us. But our eagerness to share with Ottawa, and our faith that information be used as a force for good and intelligent decisions by our government, is heartening.
We are happily a nation of nerds, collectively proclaiming “Census, welcome back.”
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