Signage marks the Statistics Canada officies in Ottawa on Wednesday July 21, 2010.
Image Credit: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
November 23, 2013 - 4:05 PM
TORONTO -- A 79-year-old Toronto woman headed to trial Friday firmly defending her refusal to fill out the mandatory census in 2011, saying she had serious concerns over a U.S. arms maker's involvement in processing data on Canada's population.
Janet Churnin has been charged with violating the Statistics Act.
But despite facing the possibility of a fine and three months in jail, the soft-spoken senior said she was ready for whatever the legal proceedings throw her way.
"I just think whatever's going to happen is going to happen," she said outside court as some of her friends looked on. "There are worse criminals than me floating around."
Statistics Canada has said the government contracted American company Lockheed Martin to provide software for its census operations in 2003, and used the custom-built systems for both the 2006 and 2011 census.
Churnin believes she filled out the census in previous years but realized only in 2011 that the government used software from the U.S. company.
"I am very much against war and I'm very much against people dropping bombs on people and I think that we should try our best to make war irrelevant," she said when explaining why she refused to fill out the census forms. "I don't want to support Lockheed Martin."
Another concern for Churnin was knowing that data on Canadians was being processed by software made by an American defence company.
"They will have access to all the information about Canadians that is going to be on the form," she said, adding that she also wanted to protest the government's scrapping of the long-form census -- which was replaced with a voluntary national household survey.
Statistics Canada's director of census operations, who testified at Churnin's trial Friday, said various security tests of Canada's census processing systems concluded that there was "absolutely no risk" that could not be handled by the data collection agency.
Yves Beland said Lockheed Martin had no access to Statistics Canada's data operation centre or its census response database.
He added that the company's involvement in developing software for the census was actually scaled back from initial plans after a number of Canadians, including MPs raised concerns in 2004 that the company could be forced to hand over data about Canadians to the American government under the U.S. Patriot Act.
The cover of the 2011 census package is seen in Ottawa on May 5, 2011.
Image Credit: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
"That was a false perception," he said, but Statistics Canada reduced the scope of Lockheed Martin's involvement in the process nonetheless.
"The census network is monitored on a 24-7 basis and we control the traffic around that network to make sure there is nobody trying (to break in)," he said.
Churnin's lawyer suggested Friday that Lockheed Martin could have built a "back door" into its software, which could potentially put the data of Canadians at risk.
He argued that Churnin's Charter rights were violated "in several respects" by being required to answer the short-form census.
"It associates her with the arms manufacturer and she as a supporter of peace finds that repulsive," Peter Rosenthal said in an interview.
"Secondly, there's a good chance that Lockheed Martin could use the fact that it designs the software in order to get the data from the census into U.S. intelligence hands."
Rosenthal pointed to recent leaked information by former U.S. intelligence employee Edward Snowden as justification for Churnin's fears. Snowden released thousands of documents showing massive trawling of domestic data by the National Security Agency.
Churnin's case is similar to that of an 89-year-old peace activist who also refused to fill out the 2011 census. In that case, Audrey Tobias was found not guilty in October by a Toronto judge who soundly criticized the government for trying to prosecute someone who was a "model citizen."
What makes Churnin's case different from Tobias's -- according to Rosenthal -- is the argument that will be made about security fears regarding Lockheed.
"What I'm most hopeful about is that the court will recognize that having Lockheed Martin do the software means that Statistics Canada was negligent in maintaining the information that they get," he said.
"Collecting census data and allowing Lockheed Martin such easy access to it, is an unreasonable seizure of information."
In 2011, StatsCan received 13 million completed census forms, a 98 per cent response rate. Overall, it referred 54 people for prosecution for failing to complete the mandatory census form.
News from © The Canadian Press, 2013