Canada in 45 minutes

I got to my desk yesterday morning and found a very interesting email.

"Hi all,
Unfortunately we haven't got any body to give a talk for our next SM seminar.
Rather than cancelling it, I am wondering if any body who has given a talk/presentation to people outside of SMS recently and is willing to share with us.
If you are keen, please contact me by 12.00pm tomorrow (29/09/06) at x4160.
Cheers,
Nellie"

No presenter, eh? I thought back to the last seminar I attended, which was a colleague speaking of her experiences working for the Office of National Statistics for the UK. She spoke about the project breakdowns, the power structures, and even what the work environment and the building itself were like. There was so much interest, latecomers in the audience had to scavenge chairs from other conference rooms. People were jammed together to listen to this talk.

Surely, I thought, a similar talk on a Statistics Canada experience would be interesting...? Before I knew what I was doing, I talked to Nellie, and she thought it was a great idea.

Gulp.

So now I'm committed... the email notification has gotten out, and I hope there's some degree of interest. It would be embarrassing if no one showed up. :-/

And of course, it's completely impossible to describe vital Statistics Canada philosophies such as complete geographic centralization (despite the vastness of the country) and its utter devotion to bilingualism (an alien concept here), without going into some history.

Augh, History, my old nemesis... what a detested subject! And yet, fairly unavoidable. I guess I'll just leave in the parts with war, drunkenness, beaver-chasing, and burning down the White House.

...Wait, that's all of it, isn't it? ;-) Maybe history isn't so bad after all.

Anyhoo, wish me luck! D-Day is this Thursday.