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Stats Canada chief resigns in growing “worthy Canadian initiative” scandal

July 21st, 2010 · 61 Comments

So the news about the head of Stats Can resigning is all over the news, in case anyone hasn’t noticed.

And, although I do take this issue seriously (as I noted in a previous post), I can’t help but think: How Canadian. Other governments get embroiled in controversy over call girls, corruption, going to war, expense accounts used for porn or moat repair. And what are we up in flames about? Getting people to comply with statistics gathering.

How delightfully dorky we are. The only time I’ve felt prouder to be a Canadian was when I was travelling one time in North Carolina and the car, through some quirk, picked up CBC, where the top news item was: “There is still no movement on the discussions about the Charlottetown Accord.”

(For those who don’t get my headline, there’s a legend in journalism that the editors at the New York Times had a competition to come up with the most boring headline they could possibly think of. The winner was “Worthy Canadian initiative.”)

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