Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
experience in Canada was the topic of discussion. When a teacher asked
how many in the class had lost significant sums of money since landing, all
30 adults raised their hands. In 2003 a tax accountant told me his experi-
ence preparing the files of wealthy immigrants: 'We have completed returns
for hundreds of business immigrants. Very, very few of them make good
money here. You could count them on the fingers of one hand'. Another
respondent from Hong Kong summed up the situation: 'It doesn't matter
how many more interviews you are doing, you will still get the same story'.
Disciplining the Author: More Interviews
It is an irony of the bureaucratic world that although much of the water-cooler
interaction of civil servants involves story-telling, sharing anecdotes about
bosses and clients and, above all the foibles of the Minister and his/her Cabinet
colleagues - who may later seek to secure their retirement years through
memoirs recounting their own stories - nonetheless in their bureaucratic role
policy-makers want numbers not narratives, even though these may offer pre-
cision but not necessarily accuracy. For the accountability culture places a
premium above all on quantification (Rose 1991). Neo-liberal practice privi-
leges benchmarks, performance standards, measured outcomes, the authority
of seemingly dispassionate calculation.
6
Among valued numerical outputs
none has higher currency concerning economic migration to Canada than the
annual report of jobs created and investments secured through the BIP, what
I shall call the annual scorecard, truly the first line of defence at question time
and the last word, the authoritative Q.E.D.,
7
in any press release.
Consequently the narrative emerging from the 24 interviews, good
enough to warrant publication and thus a judgement of validity for aca-
demic readers, was not good enough to influence decision-making for a
government audience. Government clearly requires a higher level of evi-
dence than the academic world, or at least a higher level of numeracy -which
is not necessarily the same thing. For official statistics are not as they appear
to be innocent numbers on display, inertly declaring an unproblematic truth
'out there'. As often they are purposefully crafted entries to promote, or
conceal, an intention or outcome 'in here'. How else to explain the lament
of a senior manager who had seen the annual scorecard for many years, but
knows its limitations as an assessment of the BIP? 'We have no evidence if
it [the BIP] works or doesn't work, and it's been 15 long years'. Consequently,
'statistics must always be political due to the way in which they make some
things visible while consigning others to obscurity…' (Legg 2007: 715).
So it was that I was invited by a public agency to expand the assessment
of the business programme with a larger sample and a more structured
methodology.
8
Ninety interviews were undertaken in 2002 with entrepre-
