POST 1901 CENSUS PROJECT
Open the door to Canada's Historic Census
TOWN HALL MEETINGS |
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This page contains correspondence from Rick Roberts, relating to the Town Hall Meeting held in Toronto. Rick attended the evening session of these meetings. Hi Gordon. Observations at Toronto Environics Meeting We (Sandra and I) arrived at the meeting near the beginning of Brian Gilchrist's presentation (shortly after 6 pm). The meeting wrapped up about 8 pm. The first impression I had was the number of empty seats and that there was an empty spot on the speaker schedule. Also of immediate impact was that the audience was mostly made up of people interested in family history. We were disappointed that the historical community, both organized and academic, was not strongly represented. I think that it is important that additional representation from the history community (societies, enthusiasts and academics) be achieved for both the podium and for the audience at future meetings. I thought it ironic that many of those who came to support the release of historic Census material were those who had the least to gain from it's release. There were a number of professional researchers, authors, lecturers and genealogical educators. Should the Statistics Canada position prevail, the average person who seeks their roots will encounter even more obstacles than they have in the past. The resulting roadblocks may require the services of a professional genealogist to find obscure (and inferior) substitutes for census information, or to help people navigate their way through a bureaucracy that could result from the proposed compromise. New books would need to be written and new educational classes conducted. The professionals who attended are surely aware of that fact. Even so, they gave up their time and travel expense to be there to support release of historic census information for everyone. All of the scheduled speakers were very well prepared, making good logical arguments that were well researched. No surprise there. I was especially impressed by the variety of different points made. I won't go into describing those points as I am sure that "The Committee" has copies of the presentations by now. Some of the questions from the moderator were a bit bewildering. One example was a question to a presenter "do you believe that there was a promise?". I was surprised by that question, as the presenter did not make statements regarding the so-called "promise of secrecy". It looked like a tactic to potentially get a statement from a presenter that the "promise" existed, for the official record. There were no presenters nor audience members who spoke in favour of the Statistics Canada position. One person from the audience spoke during the un-booked time. Her point was that she had been a census taker in 1986 and had made a promise of confidentiality, however she interpreted that promise to be "contemporary to the time"... not to be a promise forever. The facilitator tried his best to get her to say that she had promised one person that their information was confidential forever. The questioning and answers were somewhat confusing so a review of the official transcript is necessary to determine how successful he was. The final speaker made an interesting point that can be expanded on in future presentations. His point was about the potential cost of administrating the enforcement of "the compromise" and the lack of practicality of having an office full of civil servants pouring through genealogies to see if anyone had broken the law by including the name of someone outside of those allowed by the law... then the absurdity of charging someone with that offence. It brought a picture to my mind of burly RCMP officers dragging a 96 year old grandmother off to prison for having jotted down a cousin's name in her family tree. This whole process leaves me baffled. There are no, or few, private citizens (read... not Statistics Canada "ringers") who have a concern with the historical census being made available. Yet our government continues to support an unpopular position that does nothing to satisfy its electorate while wastefully spending our money on useless meetings designed to try and justify the Statistics Canada position. That bafflement leads one to begin to ask questions: This can't be what this is really about? What is being hidden? Why? Is there more to the story? Do the Census records still exist? Have they already been destroyed? Were they microfilmed before destruction? Has that microfilm been damaged or destroyed? Was the microfilm faulty and unreadable to begin with? These are examples of the questions that we are hearing on a daily basis, from customers and visitors to the Global Genealogy & History Shoppe, since these meetings were initiated. Rick Roberts Global Genealogy & History Shoppe |
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