Industry Minister Tony Clement prepares to testify before a Commons committee on the long-form census in Ottawa on July 27, 2010.STR/Reuters
So much for saving a drowning woman - that was so last weekend.
Indeed, the adulation Industry Minister Tony Clement received for his heroic deed has all but dissipated in the wake of his appearance Tuesday before a Commons committee in defence of his decision to scrap the mandatory long-form census.
Once the perfunctory congratulations were given for his role in a river rescue, various opposition MPs began grilling him on the reason behind the decision. All sorts of accusations flew - it's a manufactured crisis; it's ideologically based; and why can't the minister answer a simple question as to how many people have been jailed for not filling out the compulsory census?
The reviews of his performance - at least from a bevy of political pundits and the opposition - were not good.
Maclean's scribe Scott Feschuk provides a stinging bit of humour under the headline, "The Drowning of Tony Clement's Credibility." Noting that, like most Canadians, the minister likes his job and wants to keep it, Mr. Feshuk explains that "Tony Clement must now wake up each morning, walk out into the world and say things that make him sound like a wet-lipped halfwit."
He adds that Mr. Clement must also "perpetuate a campaign of fear-mongering that even the most dedicated mongers of fear would hesitate to monger: Defenceless grandmothers receive the long form and get a'scared that they will be going to jail!"
In The Globe, meanwhile, Ottawa bureau chief John Ibbitson writes that Mr. Clement's "argument was a masterful defence of a false fact. Canadians, he said, were disturbed by the intrusive nature of the questions that traditionally go out to 20 per cent of Canadian households. To be forced to provide answers, on pain of punishment, violated their privacy rights."
And in the National Post, columnist John Ivison writes that Mr. Clement's rescue "is likely to be the last good news story he features in for quite some time." The Industry Minister's testimony Tuesday "will have won few converts to the government's argument that scrapping the mandatory long-form census is a smart and necessary move," Mr. Ivison argues, concluding with a quip from an unnamed senior Conservative saying "we do pick small hills to die on sometimes."
Mr. Clement, however, has his defenders. The Prime Minister's Office circulated talking points after his testimony, saying the minister "articulated the government's fair and reasonable approach to replacing the mandatory census with a voluntary national survey."
The memo repeated some of Mr. Clement's points to the committee: "Put simply, although the Liberals and their coalition partners believe that Canadians who do not wish to hand over this personal information to the government deserve to be branded criminals and sent to jail, we do not share that belief."
Mr. Clement and the PMO argue that their new voluntary survey - the National Household Survey, which is now available online - will ask questions "identical to the questions that would be asked in the mandatory long-term census."
Which leads one to wonder why the government is so intent on emphasizing the "intrusive nature" of the census questions. For now, Mr. Clement is not commenting.