Second World War vet ready to risk jail for refusing to fill out census form

As if the census doesn't have enough problems, an 89-year-old Second World War veteran-turned peace activist is willing to go to jail for refusing to fill out the 2011 census form.

The reason: Audrey Tobias is upset her personal information could end up in the hands of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Tobias worked with the Royal Canadian Navy in Halifax during the war, then spent six decades campaigning against nuclear arms.

The Toronto resident is on trial for violating the Statistics Act, which makes filling out the basic census form compulsory. If convicted, Tobias could be fined up to $500 or spend three months in jail.

She says she won't pay.

Tobias is angry that Statistics Canada contracted a subsidiary of U.S.-based Lockheed Martin to supply the software and equipment to scan the census forms and compile the data.

Lockheed Martin is a giant corporation whose operations span energy and information technologies to satellites. But it's best known for its vast array of military hardware, everything from armoured vehicles to warships, missiles and aircraft, including the controversial F-35 fighter that was to be Canada's next warplane.

[ Related: Lockheed Martin says $10.5 billion of Canadian work on F-35 at risk without order ]

Tobias just couldn't bring herself to have her personal information processed by an arms-maker.

"The fact of giving the contract to a military company says a great deal of where the sympathies of our government lie," she told The Canadian Press on the eve of her trial.

StatsCan has had the Lockheed Martin system for a decade, using it in the 2006 and 2011 census, CP reported.

Its use has been under fire for years, including in Britain, where Lockheed Martin's involvement raised fears census data would end up in the hands of the U.S. government under provisions of the Patriot Act, according to a 2011 story in the Guardian.

Former Saskatchewan Green Party leader Sandra Finley, who was convicted of boycotting the census but is appealing, raised the same concerns on her blog.

"It is not wise for the American military through Lockheed Martin Corporation to have access, because of the Patriot Act, to the most comprehensive data base on Canadian citizens," Finley contended.

But as in the UK, Canadian census officials insist the American-owned company has no access to the information.

Yves Beland, Statistics Canada's census operations director, told the court Thursday the agency did a thorough security audit of the software and there is no way Lockheed Martin could take any of the data, CP reported.

Tobias is one of 54 people facing charges under the Statistics Act for either refusing or failing to fill in and return the census short form, the Toronto Star reported.

[ Related: Hero of 2011 Stanley Cup riot faces jail for refusing to fill out census form ]

One of them is Bert Easterbrook, hailed as a hero during the 2011 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver for helping fend off vandals trying to burn a pickup truck. Easterbrook, a marijuana activist, refused to complete the short form because he worried the census data would be shared with the Americans.

The insurgency against the census short form comes after the Conservative government opted to abolish the mandatory long-form questionnaire sent to some Canadians, which used to be subject to similar legal compulsions.

In a highly controversial move, Ottawa replaced it with a voluntary National Household Survey, which alarmed statisticians who warned the accuracy of the data, used by all governments to help design programs, would be compromised.

The issue triggered the resignation StatsCan's chief statistician, Munir Sheikh, in 2010.

StatsCan began releasing results of the survey last spring along with warnings they shouldn't be compared to past census figures. It was forced to postpone the August release of the final data dump until September over concerns about the results.

"We always perform quality checks up until the last minute on all of our data outputs, and in the course of doing these normal procedures over the weekend, we noticed some issues in some of the data we were looking at," Marc Hamel, director general of the census management office, told CBC News in August.

"We have a couple of formulas that were not correctly applied, and it's impacting a number of the results. So we will need to re-run the tables that we had planned for the release."

The Conservatives justified their abolition of the mandatory long-form questionnaire by saying people shouldn't threatened with jail if they did not want to hand over detailed information about their lives, even though the material was anonymized.

You have to ask what makes the Tobias case, and the others, any different? If you're allowing people to opt out of the long form, why not the short form? Either the data is important to the smooth running of the country or it isn't, and therefore shouldn't be compelled by law.

But of course it is important. A fine for non-compliance makes sense but perhaps putting someone behind bars is a little extreme.