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Mr. Trudeau’s other defence of the offence was that it was all in fealty to one of his famous catchphrases, his government’s passionate commitment to “evidence-based policy-making.” Evidence-based is understood of course to be in contrast to all previous governments’ embrace of less rigorous analytic tools, such as: séances, the daily horoscope, chanting under the midnight sun, the curvature of chicken beaks, seasonal fluctuations in Adrienne Clarkson’s eternal access to office expenses, and — by far the most reliable — the price of fish.

The evidence-based defence was most emphatically meant to offer contrast to that infamously policy-averse dilettante, a gadfly in government, Mr. Stephen Harper. Mr. Trudeau is on somewhat stronger ground here.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Mr. Harper’s aversion to the hard work of government, his scorn for real thought, his love of idle slogans, and most of all his temperamental hostility to the unexciting but crucial processes of deep reflection and careful judgment, made him a stench in the nostrils of all rational Canadians. By 2016 Canadians were desperate for someone serious at the helm, a policy wonk, one with a hunger for data-mining, a master-student of deliverology, and a leader who would not shrink from uncaging the hungry tigers of Statistics Canada to feed at will and to the full upon the privacy of Canadians everywhere.

Such was the current which brought us a government that issues commands to the banks that effectively transgress those banks’ own pledges of protection and privacy, that offers its statistical bureaucrats stronger search powers than the Canada Revenue Agency (a surprise to most of us, I’d guess), and which does so without asking its citizens if they’re OK with it, or even telling them what’s going on. I suppose the feeling is, if you think you need the data for “evidence-based” policy, what matter privacy, consent or transparency?