Filed under O as in “Oh for Pete’s sake”: Catherine Porter’s column in the Star yesterday taking the government of Canada to task for paying $81 million to Lockheed Martin for “an optic recognition software to process the mailed in census form.” The problem? Lockheed Martin is a weapons manufacturer.Being a lefty in this town is tough enough without having to apologize for this sort of nonsense; especially from a fellow “progressive” writing in a pinko newspaper (The Star just finished endorsing the NDP, remember?). Where to start? How about this; Francis Fukuyama (nobody’s idea of a bleeding heart social democrat) wrote the following in the New York Times at the weekend:“…as the economist Amartya Sen has argued, the ability to actually take advantage of freedom depends on other things like resources, health and education that many people in a typical society do not possess.Moreover, freedom even in this minimal sense can be threatened by a variety of social actors, from wealthy elites to corrupt local governments to large corporations that hold a whip hand over their workers. A truly free society is not simply one that limits the power of the central government; many times in history, central governments have defended the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-organized local power brokers.”An efficiently run, accurate census is precisely the basis upon which any government derives the information necessary to identify exactly the sorts of inequities that Fukuyama’s talking about. Notwithstanding that the Conservatives have unwisely made the long-form census voluntary, the fact weapons manufacture happens to produce the very technology that allows bureaucracies to process census data is as much a concern as say water traveling through potentially rusting pipes to get to your house.