OTTAWA - An editorial cartoon has gone viral inside the offices of the mathematicians, statisticians and economists who work for Statistics Canada.
The drawing shows Stephen Harper with his hand inside a puppet of Ernie from Sesame Street. The caption: "Our new chief statistician, he'll get the answers we want!"
It's a bit of gallows humour for demoralized staff who have just seen their boss quit over the integrity and independence of their agency.
The cartoon also highlights what most insiders connected to the long-census debacle know: it was the prime minister pulling the strings from the get-go.
A tumultuous month into the public phase of the crisis, Harper's office is also being blamed within his own government and party for mishandling communications around the issue.
But senior bureaucrats know things could have been far more volatile. Statistics Canada could have lost both its beloved censuses — short form and long form — if Harper's administration followed its initial plan.
The prime minister directed Industry Minister Tony Clement last winter to seek options from Statistics Canada on how it could make the long version of the census voluntary.
But sources say his circle's first instinct was to make the entire thing voluntary — both the short census and the now controversial long form.
Warned that the Brian Mulroney government had tried and failed to do just that in 1986 — and that it would be unconstitutional — the Tories backed off.
They focused, instead, on the long form, which is not directly required by the constitution.
"They see it as a compromise. They say, 'OK, let's keep it but make it voluntary.' It's an ideological compromise," said one longtime insider.
Researchers, community organizations, provinces and municipal governments urging Ottawa to restore the long-form census might want to consider that Conservatives believe they've already compromised.
Replacing the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary survey was a watered-down position, and public appeals for reinstatement appear to be falling on deaf Tory ears.
Clement reflected this sentiment in a recent comment.
"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 television.
The census issue has been bubbling under the surface for years.
When Quebec MP Maxime Bernier was industry minister during the early days of the Harper regime, he had to oversee the 2006 census. Bernier, known to have a libertarian bent, and others made it clear within the Tory caucus they found the obligatory nature of the questionnaires objectionable.
"The idea of all that is to respect Canadians. They are intelligent. They know what is good for them. And if they want to divulge information about their private lives, they will do it. If they don't want to, they won't," Bernier said in a recent interview.
"It's a noble decision, and Canadians will respect that in the end."
But Conservative insiders are slowly acknowledging they haven't done a good job of persuading the public. They say communication of their reasons has been bungled from the beginning — first internally and then publicly.
As Harper's winter edict to get rid of the long form made the rounds through the senior levels of the civil service, bureaucratic opposition to the idea snowballed.
Department after department warned that they needed the data provided by the mandatory form. Even a bulked-up, expensive voluntary survey would not provide the same quality of information.
Making the long form voluntary, they said, would lead to lower quality data at a far higher cost. Vulnerable groups, such as aboriginals and low-income people, would be lost in the new survey, while middle-class white people would be over-represented.
It would be better to stick with the status quo, the report said. Or, if the government could not accept the mandatory long form, do away with it altogether — or at least test-drive a voluntary replacement before making rash decisions.
The message was ignored, although Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz made his case successfully to keep the mandatory Census of Agriculture, with its lengthy list of detailed questions for farmers and the threat of fines and jail time for failing to co-operate.
The discussion to that point was entirely behind closed doors.
The plan was eventually announced quietly on the last Saturday in June, when public attention was consumed by the G20 riots, the international summits in Toronto and Huntsville, and the Queen's visit to Canada.
It was contained in a published order-in-council, as cabinet decisions are called. Or rather, the long census simply didn't show up in the document.
Information about this fundamental change to a 40-year-old product did not appear in StatsCan's daily releases on their website. Instead, one had to click on a small link called "Census 2011" that was never publicly pointed out.
"Pirates didn't bury their treasure that carefully," said one insider.
Few people outside the top ranks of government had an inkling it was in the works. No one outside government had been consulted — even groups with whom Statistics Canada was in regular contact about how to frame the next census.
And the announcement was left until the last minute, leaving just a few weeks between its publication and the date Statistics Canada needed to start work on implementing the new arrangement.
But if there were ever any hopes of the issue being lost in the haze of summer, they were quickly dashed.
Within a day of The Canadian Press reporting the announcement, municipal governments realized the information they rely on to make almost every key policy decision was about to be eroded.
News releases from organizations as diverse as the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities began to appear daily, calling on the government to reverse its decision.
"I think they were overwhelmed by effectiveness of the communications of the proponents of the status quo," said one Conservative.
"They underestimated the ability of their opponents to keep the story going."
The Prime Minister's Office's response in the early days of the debate was unusual at best.
The director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, sent reporters an email underlining how many Canadians had listed their religion as "Jedi" during the 2006 census, and making reference to census workers visiting homes at 10 p.m. — something Statistic Canada says does not occur.
Clement was forced to defend the decision with no prior consultation or polling to back him up. Neither was there any clear indication of just who in Canada was upset by the intrusive questions in the long form.
Bernier claimed that as industry minister, he had received 1,000 complaints a day during the census season of 2006 — but then couldn't produce a single one.
"They didn't do a very good job laying the groundwork for this," one Tory said of the PMO. "They didn't really precondition the audience."
Cabinet members such as Transport Minister John Baird and Treasury Board President Stockwell Day helped spread a few untruths, ridiculing non-existent questions in the census on bathrooms and reading material.
Other ministers remained silent, including Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, despite an investigation by the official languages commissioner over the issue.
Communications at Statistics Canada was clamped down. Soon only trickles of bare-bones information emerged from an agency that once prided itself for transparency and responsiveness.
Meanwhile, the pressure grew on Chief Statistician Munir Sheikh personally. Sheikh had always prided himself on loyally implementing government decisions to the best of his ability even if he thought they were wrong.
Suddenly Statistics Canada was in the news every day, and the reporting was not about the raw data.
Adding to Sheikh's angst was the fact legendary chief statistician Ivan Fellegi, who had reigned at Statistics Canada for 22 years, had taken a public stand against the decision. He told The Canadian Press on June 30 he would have resigned if the Conservatives had made the same move during his tenure.
Some insiders felt Sheikh, a man used to carrying out unpopular cost-cutting exercises within the government, should have spoken out much more forcefully about the change months earlier.
"All of this could have taken place well before the government announced anything and hence any compromise would have taken place with no loss of face for the Tories," said one.
Things began coming to a head with Sheikh on Friday, July 17, when Clement said he chose one of Statistics Canada's options on the census "with their recommendation."
"I asked StatsCan if I accept the ad campaign, the increased sample size, would this give us robust data, they said, yes, it would give us the data that everyone hankers for," Clement said.
But Statistics Canada's integrity, and the public's trust in its data, had always depended on the agency acting without political interference. For Sheikh, it was clear that Clement was taking the agency in a direction it did not want to go and claiming, incorrectly, that the agency was on side.
Sensing that Sheikh might be preparing to exit, Clement and the clerk of the Privy Council, Wayne Wouters, sent signals to him that they wanted him to stay on at the agency and that they had faith in his work. But it seemed Sheikh, who had spent 38 years in the public service, was already out the door.
His resignation has galvanized opposition to the census decision. It has also deepened the rift between a civil service that has long felt trampled, and the Conservative government that has long suspected it could not rely on the bureaucracy.
The Harper government's final communications move was at the special sitting of the House of Commons industry committee last week.
It was a chance to move the story away from the various groups and governments that were criticizing the decision, and pin the story on the opposition.
Tories on the committee were able to get witnesses to acknowledge that the threat of jail times was excessive, something held up as proof the government made the right decision.
Quietly during the hearings, Clement sent signals that there could be a compromise in the works. But he raised false hopes, and by the end of the day, the Conservative determination had hardened once again.
Despite all the headlines and the backlash, there is a strongly held belief within the Conservative ranks that the census story has not penetrated the psyche of many average Canadians and will soon fizzle out.
"It's just another dead news-cycle story," said one Conservative MP. "Most people will look at it, and say, what's the difference?"
With time quickly running out before the short census and the new voluntary replacement for the long census have to go to print, hopes among the government critics for a compromise are switching to despair.
Premiers meeting this week in Manitoba for their annual Council of the Federation meetings — many of whom oppose the census move — will likely be the last test of the Conservatives' resolve.
Said one insider: "The Council of the Federation might well be the last kick at the can."