Are they just going to close up shop?

As many of you will know, the advice given by Statistics Canada staff to the government about the mandatory long-form census was ignored. This situation eventually resulted in the resignation of the head of the agency and a relatively large public outcry. I am starting to wonder if this situation has also now lead to the destruction of the Statistics Canada website, which presently seems to be down. The only comment given on the splash page is

"We're sorry! The website is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience."

While they suggest that interest surfers can head over to the Census for some information it turns out that data normally available through that site is also unavailable. Suspicious, to say the least.

I really feel as though I have no choice but to understand this disruption of service as an outcome of the dispute between the public service and the government of the day, nothing else could possibly explain such a strange service disruption. Of course, assuming that this general interpretation is correct I have no idea how exactly to interpret this turn of events. Was the site sabotaged by disgruntled public servants? Was the site taken off-line by the government with the hopes that if fewer people could access the 2006 Census results they would be less upset about the fact that the 2011 Census will have inferior data?

Anyway, hopefully the problems will soon be resolved so that I can figure out what percentage of Newfoundland residents have high school diplomas.

Update: At least one library seems to think that the fact that the website is down is just part of a scheduled maintenance outage. This seems suspicious as no such comment is included on the Statistics Canada splash page and such a comment would have been just as easy to include as was the comment about going to the Census page. And then there is the recommendation that people go to the non-functional Census page. All-in-all there is something very fishy going on, and I am pretty sure 'routine maintenance' is just an all-to-easy cover up.