I admire the plea for good manners that came from John Garner. Adherence to the rules of politeness is a good way to make for a better and more pleasant world, but I am not convinced that one can always play the political game and still act like a gentleman. Even small issues (in the greater scheme of things) like the census debate have a tendency to come down to the underlying matter of POWER. I believe that we are seeing this now; one way that the government can deal with awkward matters is to simply not respond to the pleas of the governed; they have the power to do this. I think that we may be coming to the stage where we will have to consider a change in tactics in order to get some movement on the matter of the census release. We have provided a mass of polite, well reasoned arguments and the years are passing by. We believe that timely release of the line-item census is in the best interests of all Canadians, so we may be forced to use the power that we can command to see that this just aim is achieved, and that may not be a nice thing to see.....or do. I am reminded of the dictum of that famous activist, Jerry Rubin: "People who say 'I agree with your goals, but I don't know about your tactics' smell of foul horseshit. Goals are irrelevant. The tactics, the actions are critical" Now John, of course I would never use language like that to you, but he does colourfully make a point that we should all be thinking about very carefully. Thanks for bringing this important point of debate to the attention of the Canada-Census list. Bob Westbury "A gentleman is a person who is never UNINTENTIONALLY rude"