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NEW: California mayor resigns after being charged with acting as an illegal agent of China. Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty as she faces up to 10 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors. They say she secretly worked to advance pro-Beijing messaging in the U.S., allegedly spreading propaganda tied to the Chinese government.

More than 15 years after the Harper government’s changes to the long-form census, we still haven’t reckoned with one of the most important issues the controversy exposed. The debate at the time focused almost entirely on whether the government was right to make the survey voluntary. But the episode raised a deeper question that received far less attention. Statistics Canada operates partly on a cost-recovery basis. In practice, that means it earns significant revenues—about $120M or 15% of its annual funding—by selling custom tabulations, analytical products, and other services to governments, academics, businesses, and advocacy groups. There’s nothing inherently wrong with charging for specialized data products. But it does create a tension. The long-form census isn’t an ordinary survey. Canadians are legally required to answer detailed questions about their income, housing, family circumstances, commuting patterns, and more. That is, the state uses its coercive powers to compel citizens to provide information. That power may be justified when the data are clearly necessary for core public purposes—things like transfer formulas, official language obligations, and basic demographic analysis. But the case becomes less clear when the information is also being collected to meet the needs of third parties who would otherwise have to gather it themselves voluntarily and at their own expense. At that point, the census starts to look less like a straightforward public-interest exercise and more like a state-backed data platform serving the needs of organized stakeholders. It raises the basic question: should the state’s coercive authority be used to generate data that serve private or commercial interests as much as, or perhaps more than, a clearly defined public purpose? There’s a good case that “stakeholders find this information useful” is not, on its own, a sufficient reason to compel millions of Canadians to provide it. The burden of proof should be higher. When the state requires disclosure, when it draws on its monopoly on coercion, census questions should be justified by a clear public purpose—not simply by the fact that governments, researchers, consultants, or businesses want the answers. That, to me, was the main takeaway from the 2010 census controversy. And it remains largely unresolved.