Esteemed Listers; Greetings! There can be no doubt that our cause is in deep trouble. Unless we are very lucky, the government will continue to ram S-13 through Parliament just as fast as they can. Their fear, as Gordon has said, is that if they do not finish this off quickly, they will again face legal action, and, certainly as regards the 1911 Census, they would be almost certain to lose in a court of law. So the most likely scenario is that no free debate on S-13 will be permitted in the House, and that the Liberal Party Whips will make sure that Liberal MPs toe the party line, regardless of their personal feelings about release after 92 years, which many have expressed in the CCC survey, and which are there for all to see on the Global Genealogy site. With the bill passed into law our chances of getting back to a more reasonable treatment of the interests of genealogists and historians, will be even slimmer than they have been during the last 5 years of up-hill sledding. So what do we do now? I agree that we should continue to inform our MPs about the genealogical catastrophe that would result from the passage of Bill S-13, and do everything that we can to persuade them to radically modify or oppose the bill. But, if that fails, as seems painfully likely, what then? I want to suggest that we start to seriously think of using the civil disobedience option. A few of us have been urging this course of action for a long time, but our more level-headed colleagues have quite correctly insisted that it would be better to pursue our cause with reasoned debate through the channels provided by our democracy. But this has failed. The Senators in their wisdom seem to have overlooked the compelling evidence that most Canadians have no worries about confidentiality issues after 92 years have elapsed. They have been unduly respectful of the eccentric opinions of a very few mandarins. I would like to see us put our collective minds to the task of putting real pressure on our opponents. But this will not be easy – nothing is. We will need to ask the following questions, and others which I hope the CCC listers will bring forward: 1. What form or forms would civil disobedience take? 2. Would genealogists have the stomach for a slug fest in the dirt? How much do genealogists really care about the loss of one of their greatest sources of information? 3. Our strength lies in our numbers, perhaps as high as half the population; how could we set about “mobilizing the masses”? Let us debate this vital issue. Under normal circumstances, I should say no more until others have had the chance to express their opinions, but I am shortly to go into hospital for neurosurgery (not prefrontal lobotomy, let me say!) and I would like my views to be considered in this discussion. I think that the most effective attack would be on StatsCan. Much of the difficulty that we have encountered has been from this organization. They have cynically over-represented the need for “secrecy forever” as an ingredient for successful collection of census data. They seem to have a blind spot with regard to history, especially micro-history. They are vulnerable because they really do need the good will of Canadians to do their job. I realize that providing truthful information to the census enumerator is mandated by law, but there is a limit to the number of people whom they could charge and punish. ( I see in the papers recently that no less than 20,000 people in the last census gave their religion as “followers of the Jedi”. This religion does not exist outside of the Star Wars movies. For sure these people were not all challenged in court) What StatsCan fears more than outright refusal to comply with the census laws is the provision of false data, especially false data that is hard to verify by other means. We have the means to make the Canadian Census a much less reliable source of data. Furthermore not all of the surveys carried out by StatsCan carry the force of law. I was looking through the StatsCan site the other day and I found 18 surveys with voluntary participation. Too many refusals to participate in these surveys would seriously weaken the validity of the results. If we do decide to follow this strategy we will have to work very hard to establish a network that allows us to get our message to all genealogists in Canada, not just the few hundred that subscribe to CCC, or even the larger number that can be reliably reached by e-mail. Questions No.2 and 3 require reflection too. The census issue affects all Canadian genealogists to some degree, and yet perhaps some 150,000 people (at a high estimate) have been directly and actively involved in the effort to free the census. A (very) low estimate for the number of genealogists in the country is 2 million. Will we be able to move at least some of the other 82% of genealogists? How would this be done? Let us all put our heads together to try to come up with some strategies that are do-able and that the withholders cannot simply shrug off. Let us do this quickly as time is running short. Courtesy and sweet reason are no longer good enough. We are at the very end. Only strong action will save the censuses. Bob