Justin Trudeau, King of Canada, has issued his first edict: the reinstatement of the long census form. Minister in charge of Canadian census Navdeep Singh Bains, will jail people who refuse to divulge personal information required by the long census form:

[The Liberal government] didn’t provide details on how it plans to make sure that people actually fill it out, although Navdeep Bains, the minister of innovation, science and economic development, said “the law is the law” and the Statistics Act hasn’t changed, which suggests penalties would include jail time. Bains said restoring the long form will mean a return to solid, high-quality data.

It seems lost on Bains that saying that “the law is the law” does not make any particular action of the government morally right. Putting old ladies in jail because they refuse to fill out a form is disproportionate to the alleged crime. That it is an invasion of privacy and a violation of universal human rights makes it all the more despicable. But the new Trudeau government seems to be carrying on the tradition of the elder Trudeau’s attitude towards law, as we discussed earlier (see, Burning down barns is not wrong because it is illegal; it is illegal because it is wrong).

In the past, the government found one woman guilty of refusing to fill out the long census form. She was 79-years old.  I have seen how government persecution of senior citizens can lead to fear and sometimes premature death, as in the case of friend of the Isaac Brock Society Mark Pinetree, who lived out his final years in fear of the IRS. He was a psychiatrist who had moved back to Brazil after becoming a US citizenship, not realizing that the IRS would persecute him even though he no longer lived in the USA.

In any case, if we were hoping that the government of Trudeau the Younger would respect the privacy rights of citizens of Canada, we now have tangible evidence that the new King doesn’t really believe in privacy. This bodes ill for those hoping for the repeal of the FATCA IGA.