Greetings All. I copy here FYI an excellent letter sent to Prime Minister Paul Martin from a supporter from New York. All subscribers to the CCC list should feel free to post their own letters to the list -- also any responses that you have received for letters you have written to the MPs and Senators. Happy Hunting Gordon ============================= September 4, 2004 Right Hon. Paul Martin Office of the Prime Minister 80 Wellington Street Ottawa, Ontario K1A0A2 CANADA Dear Sir: From my home in NY, I have been watching with great interest the campaign to preserve and liberate the Canadian census records on schedule. Until getting involved in genealogical research, I had no understanding of the complexity of the relationship between Canada and the USA, or the degree to which we are literally one family (albeit a somewhat dysfunctional one.) One of the things my cousin and I learned from census records on both sides of the border is that her Canadian mother was descended from New Englanders who fought on the American side in the Revolutionary War and only moved north of the St. Lawrence about 1800, while our fathers' very American family from Brooklyn, NY, was descended from a British soldier who settled in Nova Scotia at the close of the Revolution and a whole bunch of Loyalists from New Brunswick, and only moved south to Brooklyn about 1860. At each stage in our search, census records were critical in confirming we had indeed found our family at their new home, rather than some other family with the same last name, so I can appreciate the importance of the census records to historians and other researchers. I read that you, yourself, have an interest in family history, and recently participated in ceremonies honoring contributions made by your family to the community where they lived for several generations, so I am sure you also appreciate the need to preserve access to this uniquely important source of information for future generations of Canadians wanting to better understand the people and culture of their great nation. However, I believe the most important argument in favor of guaranteeing continued public access to the whole of the personally identifiable information in the census is that it is the only way to insure the people recorded there will not be lost to history as individual people with individual stories to tell. The census records are a form of personal immortality. Destroying or permanently sealing them in the name of protecting the privacy of the individuals to whom they relate can only "protect" these individuals by robbing them of their human face and consigning them to the oblivion of impersonal statistics forever. Individual census records should be preserved and made available in detail to all who value the people they record enough to want to learn about them, not just because this will benefit researchers, but also because in the process of research, the people themselves will be brought back to life as fully as possible. In their own lifetime, they may have been too busy earning a living to spend time writing down their stories for posterity, or they may have felt they were not important enough for anyone other than their immediate family to ever want to remember (how many veterans of World War II fall into that category!) But these ordinary average people going about their daily lives are the ones who made both our countries what they are today, and each of them is entitled to be fully recognized for the individual role he or she played in our collective story. It is understandable that the Chief Statistician would feel statistical compilations to be a satisfactory record of an individual's place in history, but the groundswell of opposition to his actions shows that the rest of us believe more is required. We understand on a deeper level it is the little details about individual people that best enable the true heart and soul of a nation to live on from one generation to the next. Please do everything in your power to insure these details remain accessible to this generation and those that follow us. In particular, please direct the Chief Statistician of Canada to transfer the 1906 and subsequent census records to the National Library and Archives of Canada on the same schedule and terms of availability to the public as previously applied to earlier census records. Thank you. Yours truly, Gail R. Gordon