A few years back, at Uvic I heard David Foot speak, he of Boom, Bust & Echo fame. The man expressed his pleasant surprise at having watched his work become so popular, “go viral” as a current expression would have it, even if the medium was print rather than electronic. All he was doing was reading the evidence and stating conclusions.
He explained that as a demographer, his work was really quite boring to friends and even family. He studied populations and he stated the trends determined by the facts presented in such studies. He did not make exciting or far-fetched speculations based on those population studies; he merely said what had happened and therefore what was most likely to happen as a consequence.
In Toronto, for instance, the birth rate increased after 1945 and there was a “boom” in the number of children who would be requiring schools by the year 1951. There was another boom in the mid-fifties as immigration increased. An examination of the population trends dictated that there would be an increasing demand for classroom space through the sixties, and Dr. Foot said as much to authorities.
The people in charge of making the necessary decisions did not listen or did not react quickly enough, however, and the “portable” era came in with new schools being constructed only as taxation measures provided the necessary funds.
There was a point, though, when this “boom” of children passed through the system and school populations could be predicted to fall off. It was now time to stop building and let student numbers and building space reach an equilibrium. In another ten years or so, there would be an “echo” of the former boom as the first wave of children had families of their own, but the demographic data showed that the numbers would not be as large as those in the first group.
All this was not speculation, but simply numbers telling their story. It was evidence-based research in a pretty simple form, and the consequence of official apathy was inconvenience at the least and misspent resources at worst. No one died because of that apathy. In other areas of data capture, the story is tragic and our propensity for bias becomes a telling factor.
Here's Dr. Carol Tarvis whose book, co-authored with Elliot Aronson Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, delves into the effect cognitive dissonance has on people and on how they see both the world and themselves. The book, first published in 2007, was updated and revised for a second edition in 2015 and a third edition in 2020, with a new last chapter on the Trump phenomenon: "Dissonance, Democracy, and the Demagogue. In writing for Skeptic Magazine she had this to say:
Can We Separate Bias From Ideology?
Skeptic Magazine: CAROL TAVRIS Sept. 16, 2025
“And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” —Matthew 7:3
“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” —Thomas Carlyle
Schools, from kindergarten to graduate programs, are always ground zero in any culture war. Ban their books! Fire their teachers! Extremists from both the right and the left share this censorious impulse to protect their children from dangerous ideas—dangerous ideas being defined as anything on which people disagree, usually sex, race, gender, sex, history, religion, prejudice, and did I say sex? They deliver propaganda. We tell the truth. They indoctrinate our children. We educate them.
Let’s stipulate that everyone is biased. The brain comes packaged with a bunch of self-serving mechanisms (the confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and so on) that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and wise. My favorite bias is the bias that we are unbiased. Social psychologist Lee Ross named this phenomenon “naive realism,” the conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, “as they really are,” so anyone who disagrees with us is not seeing clearly.
Science, which might be defined as the systematic effort to force us to see clearly especially when we are wrong, is always under attack from those who cannot tolerate the mere existence of dissonant views. Today, however, the venom of polarizing ideologies has been poisoning the process more than ever. How true, but now how quaint, seems the sublime observation by Richard Feynman to students in his 1964 class at Cornell University:
If your guess disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.
Everyone's biased
One colleague, noting that rats are nocturnal but researchers study them in daytime, said, “actually, psychology is the study of the white male sleepy rat.” Psychology had plenty of biases to correct.
Today the researchers are still producing reports for government agencies, and both David Foot and Carol Tarvis might hope those agencies will act on the data in a timely manner. Lives are being lost through procrastination fueled by bias.
In Victoria we know that the cost to house someone vs the cost of keeping that person living on the street is about 1 to 3. If you had to see your pool of tax dollars used up 3 times as fast because no one would build the necessary shelters, wouldn’t you complain? Well you can see just that; speak up!
The opponents argue that "those human scum are being coddled and given food and a house when responsible citizens like us worked hard for our lifestyle". The evidence for the contrary view is not that hard to come by in this digital age, although you still have to examine it as critically as ever.
Who said it? What did they say? What are their qualifications for saying that in this area of enquiry? How did they arrive at those conclusions? How broad a base does their research have?
Opposition always comes from neo-Con voices regarding self-made “men” and the value of the work ethic and the implied laziness or bad money management skills of the poor. Seldom do they check the data on the cost of maintaining "Insite" for example in the downtown east side of Vancouver vs the cost of policing the “drug problem”, even when you add in the cost of burying victims (and I call them such) of our failed drug policy.
Nationally, there is a debate over the cost of child care programs vs giving money to parents for them to (hopefully) use wisely - it reduces to the Conservative small gov't. concept vs the custodial Liberal idea. When you start taking the data apart, case by case, you will find that some parents in jurisdictions that gave them money used it "wisely" ie. they paid fees for childcare so that they could work. In other cases the parent(s) used the money to buy food or help pay for a place to live. How do you judge those individuals? Or the structure of the program? The federal NDP have lobbied for "$10-a-Day Daycare" but with only partial success.
There is also the cost of centralizing services for highways, education and health care vs the expense of putting them out to tender to the cheapest bidder, and then pursuing redress for incompetence or mismanagement of that lowest bidder. Healthcare is a huge issue far beyond my competence or research time, but of the doctors who have written critiques and suggested improvements almost all have asked at the very minimum for a central (national) patient registry so that medical records will be instantly available to emergency personnel across the country.
Highways in BC used to be administered by a Dep't of Highways that built and maintained all roadways outside of municipal boundaries. Now there is a Ministry of Transportation & Transit and a lot of the maintenance of the infrastructure is outsourced to private contractors. Other provinces have done the same, with one similarity of result. See if you can find it.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Highway maintenance in BC was privatized in 1988. Since then BC’s highway network has been maintained by private firms hired by the province. The independently prepared 1994 “Burton Report” found cost increases to highway maintenance program, concern over long-term preservation of highway assets, and decreased competition.
The 1991 Minister of Transportation and Highways that undertook “a thorough review of the privatized road and bridge maintenance program to ensure that the taxpayers of British Columbia are getting good value for their dollars and that high standards of service are maintained.” found that costs had actually increased by $19 million per year. The report also found that the more visible, cosmetic work was being done more extensively than the less visible preventative maintenance work, to an extent that the highway infrastructure was at risk over the long term.
ALBERTA
In 1995-96 it decided to outsource all the maintenance to private contractors.
In 2002, a review to determine if the switch to private highway maintenance had resulted in lower costs for the Alberta government while maintaining the same level of service found: “[P]rivatization in any form – as presently constituted under Alberta’s privacy laws and the secrecy practiced by the government itself, represent a genuine problem of public accountability . . . Neither consulting firms, contracted by the government, nor the Auditor General of Alberta are mandated to examine the consequences of privatization”.
QUÉBEC
While it is difficult to determine what percentage of highways in Québec are maintained by private sector contractors in any given year, a few things are perfectly clear.
The number of people employed by the provincial ministry of transportation has declined steadily – between 2009-10 and 2015-16, it fell by 41%. There have been additional cuts since.
Private snow-clearing contractors in Québec have been convicted and fined for price fixing but allowed to continue providing highway snow clearing services to the province.
In 2015-16, the ministry of transportation issued 95 notices of reprimand to subcontractors “for breaches that compromised public safety.”
A 2017 report by Québec’s Auditor General revealed the department, which contracts out 95% of its work, was unable to determine it was getting the best price available or to ensure the quality of the work being done. Small firms were often excluded from the process, and cost estimates were not being conducted properly.
Finally, (you thought I'd never shut up, didn't you) on a subject dear to my aging heart, there is the cost of retirement plan management vs the cost of looking after indigent geriatric populations. Some authors have suggested that the human race may actually be ending and noting that in Japan with the largest number of centenarians, there are 4X as many diapers produced for incontinent geriatrics as for babies, and Japan is just one of the coutries we have data for. We need immigrants. Always have. And we need babies. Remember David Foot. About retirement.
Every retired teacher I have spoken to about this issue tells me they have heard this complaint. Someone will accuse them of leaching off the public purse, or in gentler terms of taking a pension from the government coffers long after they retired. Yes, they do. I'm at year 27 and going strong.
But it's my money. I paid into a retirement (superannuation) plan for my entire working life and now the investment is returning my money to me. The huge portfolio also supports an administrative staff to decide on investments and to dole out the pensions.
We need more plans like this, not fewer. The Canada Pension Plan could be overhauled for efficiency perhaps, but not eliminated as some folk in the private investment counselling world would like. They'd love to help workers invest a portion of income in favoured portfolios (favoured because of the high fee percentages paid to those counsellors).
I'll close with a comment attributed to a Canadian political philosopher, George Grant.
"There will come a time when we are, or will be, beholden to someone or some thing. The question is who or what - the state or our neighbours?"