OTTAWA—Federal Conservatives are being urged to compromise on their axing of the long census questionnaire, perhaps by repealing the threat of jail time for non-completion or pruning so-called sensitive questions.

Former chief statistician Munir Sheikh was praised for his “principled” decision to resign in protest over the Harper government’s move to replace the mandatory long form questionnaire with a voluntary survey.

But experts who fear the loss of the data the long form census produces say the problem remains unsolved as long as the government refuses to reverse its decision.

“My main concern at this point is where do we go from here?” said Ivan Fellegi, who retired in 2008 after 23 years as chief statistician.

Fellegi said he hopes a compromise can be found for the 2011 census next May. For example, he said the provision to jail Canadians who don’t fill out the census paperwork could be repealed since it’s never used.

“If there are some particular questions that are offensive, why not remove those from the questionnaire,” said Fellegi, who retired in 2008 after 23 years as chief statistician.

But he said it’s “urgent” that decisions be made, since Statistics Canada is already well-advanced in its plans for the May, 2011 census.

“We are less than a year away from the census, which is the government’s largest peacetime operation. It’s just a huge undertaking,” he said. “There are, logistically, literally perhaps just days left.”

Others confirm that some supporters of the mandatory census are working on a compromise in an 11th-hour bid to preserve the long form census.

Meanwhile, opposition politicians say that Sheikh did the right thing by stepping down rather than implement a government policy he saw as flawed.

“He was being pushed around by the government and he said, ‘No.’ He defended the independence of an agency that commands the respect of all Canadians,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said during a stop in Quebec.

“This government is engaged in a kind of ideological pursuit of ignorance. Wouldn’t you prefer to have information as opposed to ignorance?” he said.

Sheikh had apparently been willing to implement the government’s decision after it was first announced, telling agency employees in a June 28 email that the changes to the census had been published in the Canada Gazette two days earlier. The email notes the change from a mandatory long-form questionnaire to the voluntary one, and that it will go to more households.

It concludes “I know that I can count on your ongoing support to ensure the success of these two important Statistics Canada priorities.”

But Sheikh went offside with the initiative after Clement began implying that the move to a voluntary survey was done with the backing of the agency itself, a suggestion former employees called “offensive.”

Clement told the Star Thursday the government will not reconsider the census decision.

He later said the government’s position already represented a compromise between those who disliked the long form and those who support it.

“That, I think, is a reasonable compromise position, and I’m certainly looking forward to working with StatsCan in the months ahead to implement that decision by government and to make sure it is done in a way that was valid and correct,” Clement told CBC TV’s Power and Politics.

Fellegi said the reputation of Statistics Canada is now of paramount importance.

“It was implied that Statistics Canada advised that a voluntary census would in some sense be an adequate substitute for a compulsory one. It’s an elementary fact that it isn’t,” Fellegi said.

“The agency really couldn’t be left in a position where its competence could be impugned.’’

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Because Sheikh was bound by cabinet confidences and unable to tell his side of the story, he was left in an “impossible situation,” said Ian McKinnon, chair of the National Statistics Council, an advisory body to Statistics Canada.

But in leaving, Sheikh made clear that despite Conservative claims, the voluntary survey “cannot” produce the same quality of data as a mandatory form.

Indeed, Ontario Conservative MP David Tilson has already said he has no intention of filling out the voluntary survey, saying Ottawa has no business asking about citizens’ faith or other personal matters.

“Because it’s voluntary, I have no reason to be completing it,” Tilson (Dufferin–Caledon) told the Orangeville Banner newspaper.

Seven years ago, the U.S. Census Bureau looked at introducing a voluntary long form census but in the end decided it would be less reliable and more expensive to implement.

“If you made it voluntary, you had a response drop-off and that costs more money for the country to get an accurate census. That was the big finding,” Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, told CBC TV Thursday.

A voluntary response “makes for less useful data, less accurate data than you need to run a big complicated economy and government as both Canada and the United States do,” he said.

Opposition critics laid the blame for the “manufactured crisis” at the feet of Clement and a government that is appealing to its “fringe” who believe the census is an invasion of privacy.

NDP MP Charlie Angus told reporters that Clement is responsible “for a completely unnecessary crisis of confidence that has developed in the federal bureaucracy.”

“A civil servant like Mr. Sheikh would have no other choice but to resign rather than continue on with the fiction that Mr. Clement has been trying to put out there that the ending of the long form census was done with the support and the advice of senior bureaucrats,” he told reporters.

Liberal house leader Ralph Goodale said StatsCan’s international reputation is “hanging by a thread because of a bungling minister and a Conservative government that simply doesn’t believe in fact-based decision making.”

Goodale held up what he said were about 600 emails from Canadians over 72 hours who opposed the Conservative decision to axe the mandatory long form census – “more than on any other issue recently,” he said.

With files from Andrew Chung, Tonda MacCharles and The Canadian Press

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