“Canada’s so-called ’Employment Equity’ laws long ago adopted the Orwellian practice of building lies into their very names…. Citizens are thus placed in the position of being required by law to provide information they know to be false, thereby supporting programs they know to be harmful.”

Like millions of other Canadians, I filled out my census form this month. I was one of the lucky ones required by law to complete the long form. I did my civic duty, even though the form was thirty-two pages long and asked over two hundred questions about the education, ethnic background, and income of myself and my family.

After completing the form, I began to wonder. Is there anything the government believes it doesn’t have a right to know about me? Are there any limits that it feels obliged to impose upon itself when asking questions of its citizens? In a democracy, should it simply be assumed that the government has a right to ask us anything?

One worry is about the mandatory disclosure of living arrangements. Thirty years ago when the federal government decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, Pierre Trudeau summed up the theory behind Canada’s new legislation by saying that government had no place in the bedrooms of the nation.

It now appears that we no longer believe this. Whether they have told their families or not, gay and lesbian couples are now required by law to disclose their living arrangements to the government, not only on the census form, but also when they file their income tax each year. Whether they want to or not, all law-abiding gay and lesbian couples have now been “outed”.

Another worry concerns race. Of the fifty-seven questions involving so-called “sociocultural information””, several are about race, ethnicity and ancestry. In them, careful distinction is made between West Asian, Southeast Asian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese socioculturnal groups. Yet no similar distinctions exist for people whose ancestors originated in either Africa or Europe. Here, Black and White are the only choices. Not only are such categories notoriously vague and subjective, they also have no basis in scientific fact.

Defenders of these kinds of questions might argue that this information helps the government to provide services to its citizens in their languages of choice. But if this is the intent, earlier questions specifically about language would have been sufficient.

Instead, as we are told on the census form itself, this information “is collected to support programs that promote equal opportunity for everyone to share in the social, cultural and economic life of Canada.”

Yet this is hardly an incentive for many people to complete these questions. Canada’s so-called Employment Equity laws long ago adopted the Orwellian practice of building lies into their very names. Instead of promoting equal opportunity, these laws provide incentives for employers to treat different groups of citizens differently. Citizens are thus placed in the position of being required by law to provide information they know to be false, thereby supporting programs they know to be harmful.

A university colleague once told me that he believed he could discover who the most powerful social groups were at any time in Canadian history. All he had to do was read the tax code. There, within a single document, is a record of every successful lobby group and, by omission, a record of every unsuccessful one as well. If it turns out that farmers had more political influence than factory workers during the 1950s, this inevitably shows up in the form of tax concessions of various kinds during that period. If it turns out that film companies are today more powerful than farmers, this will once again be reflected in the tax code.

Using this same line of reasoning, a census is not only a tool for government to get information about its citizens, it’s also a tool for citizens to get information about their government. Reading the census tells us who has the ear of government today, and what the government’s agenda will be tomorrow.

In this respect, questions about unpaid housework and unpaid child minding, just like questions about race and living arrangements, are all informative. Never mind that men and women notoriously fail to agree about how many hours of unpaid work they each contribute. The mere fact that these questions are being asked, and others are not, tells us something about the influence of the feminist lobby and about what the government’s agenda will look like tomorrow.

And what are we to conclude from the fact that no where in this year’s census are we asked about how often we have sex, or about how often we buy a new car, or about whether we do any of our banking offshore? What are we to conclude from the fact that we have not been yet asked whether we are planning to have any children in the next five years, or whether we would prefer to send our children to public or private school, or whether we have temporarily left the country to obtain a medical procedure that was unavailable at home?

Unless we believe that there are at least some limits on what governments have a right to know, it looks like these and a thousand other questions like them will just have to wait until next time.

Andrew Irvine is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.