Human Resources Committee on Nov. 18th, 2010

[Ken Dryden, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

I'm sorry to ask quickly here, but we don't have very much time.

In listening to everybody today and also to the debate outside, it seems as if we really are talking by each other, and there's very little listening going on in either case. On one side, it is primarily about information, and on the other side, it's primarily about intrusiveness and the right of a citizen to say yes or no. That doesn't mean that on either side there isn't a feeling about the other, but the feeling that the way things are and the way life is lived...that this is the position to come down.

I believe very fundamentally in the importance of information, and while you don't offer the final voice--nobody around here offers the final voice--collectively, we offer a mixture of voices, which really matters. If the mixture is weakened, then the discussion and the debate are weakened. The voices depend on the money to help fund those voices in one way or another, corporate or charitable, and also the access to information. If either of them is cut short, then we have a big problem.

We all know the experience that if you don't measure it, it doesn't exist; if it doesn't exist, then there isn't a problem; if there isn't a problem, then why have programs? That follows, unfortunately, except the fact is that life intervenes and demonstrates the need for programs. That's what I think is really lost here. And this really wasn't an issue until it was made an issue. The vast majority of Canadians think, and have thought, it's no big deal. For those who think it is a big deal, they don't fill it out or fill out parts of it, and they don't get fined and they don't go to jail.

The reality is, the way in which life is lived, the way in which this has worked, it has been no big deal. There has been the combination of information and the absence of intrusion.

Does anybody have some comments on where you think we are in this?

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Sixty seconds, please.

[Dr. Cordell Neudorf]

I've certainly been speaking about this to a lot of friends and colleagues locally. What I've come to understand is that the vast majority of people have no idea how this information is used on a daily basis. While they initially may feel they understand the privacy and intrusiveness issues, once they hear how the data is actually used and that the protections are in place, I've found them overwhelmingly supportive of the need for collecting the information in the way that it's collected.

I think the bigger issue that's behind this is just a misunderstanding or a lack of information for Canadians on how this data is safeguarded and how it's used for the public good.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you very much.

You have the floor, Mr. Lessard.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mrs. Chair.

First, I want to thank you for being here this morning. Your testimonies are extremely important. Even if we do not always understand why the government wanted to change this, I believe that your statements throw even more light on the usefulness of this major component of the census for scientists as well as for social organizations.

My first question is for Mr. Neudorf. You started by saying that, in order to do any prevention work, since healthcare is not only a matter of healing but also of prevention, steps have to be taken for people to be able to live in healthy environments. I would like to hear more about that.

You specifically referred to the fact that First Nations and Métis are underrepresented with this questionnaire. Could you tell us more about this?

Mrs. Taillon, you stated that not having this kind of data would jeopardize the health of our children. There may be a link between those two issues.

I would like both of you to give us more information about this, but very briefly since Mrs. Beaudin also has a few questions for you.

[Dr. Cordell Neudorf]

Very briefly, what I was referring to is at the rural and on-reserve level, as opposed to at the city level, where we do have a more representative sample of first nations, Inuit, and Métis with the census data.

So the underrepresentativeness is the group as a whole, once you get into the rural and reserve areas.

[Peggy Taillon]

If you think about the short form, it's a snapshot at a very high level, almost like a satellite level. The long form takes a look at what's happening on the ground in our local communities, in our local neighbourhoods. It can isolate troubled communities by postal code. It can help identify the most pressing issues for marginalized communities.

So, again, it helps us understand how to develop programs like Success by 6; where to put resources in the event of a pandemic; and where you mobilize and bring communities to respond to their greatest needs in the most specifically targeted way so that you're not just tackling poverty: you understand there's a group of Somali Canadians who live in this particular community with children under the age of five who need a specific type of service and you can provide it to them. We can better respond to those needs in that way--very targeted.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Good morning and thank you for being here. My question is especially for Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Taillon. However, the other witnesses may also want to answer.

To be as practical as possible, I would like to come back to the 2 or 3 questions that are often asked by the government since they are often the ones that people do not think may be useful. I refer to the number of bedrooms, the distance traveled to go to work, and the time at which she wakes up. Those are the examples the government often uses to claim that such questions are not very useful.

I would also like you to tell us how you would use the answers to such questions in the census.

[Katherine Scott]

Absolutely.

The question about the quality and type of housing that Canadians have has been some of the most used information from the census. Certainly CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, has done extensive research over the last 40 years, describing the Canadian housing stock, the quality of housing stock.

They've developed a measure of Canadians in need of core housing, which assesses the quality of their housing, whether they're overcrowded. Certainly the number of bedrooms in a home as compared to the population is how we determine whether there is significant overcrowding.

The census provides such detailed community-level data that we can then identify, for instance, aboriginal communities or smaller communities where there are significant housing problems. That's a very concrete example of how that question is used.

I happen to know, certainly in municipalities across the country, that the data on commute times is critical. Are people commuting to their places of work? How long does that take? What kind of urban infrastructure is in place to accommodate commuters? What is the time and the health impact on Canadians who drive an hour and a half to two hours per day, each way, to their places of work?

This information is critical in Canada, certainly in the largest three urban areas. I know for a fact that information is critically important to the cities of Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and certainly Calgary as well.

That particular information, for instance, was used by the City of Calgary when they attempted to look at the prevalence of transit poverty in that city during the boom before the last recession. They were finding that in the absence of good public transit, people were spending extraordinarily large sums of money on transportation because they couldn't afford to live adjacent to their places of work. They were talking about an emerging problem in Calgary called transit poverty.

This type of information is absolutely derived from the information on the long-form census. We can understand this at the community level. These are all very important things.

[Dr. Cordell Neudorf]

In addition to that, in terms of not just planning for future transit and those types of issues--family time and quality of life--some of the issues around housing and the number of rooms versus number of people are used a lot, from an overcrowding perspective, for disease prevention planning, things like tuberculosis, influenza. Many of the respiratory conditions are far more easily spread in overcrowded situations.

It allows us to fine-tune a different type of approach for disease prevention planning based on where overcrowding is in our communities as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Martin.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thanks for coming this morning.

Katherine, I'm interested in what you're seeing. You're the professional here, the researcher. We've had cities--33 of them on the list from Census Watch--and provinces indicating their concern with this decision. We have social planning councils, townships...a lot of them have indicated concern.

Ultimately the federal government transfers money; the provinces and municipalities have to deliver the programs. They're getting less money. Particularly now, as they look at the deficit we've run up because of the recession, there will be less money. They have to be very careful where they spend that money, so they need good data.

In your work, I know there have been cutbacks to some of the organizations that collect that data. Where is it at? What are the stress levels? Are you going to be able to deliver?

[Katherine Scott]

As a national non-profit, are we able to continue to do work by using these data to tell the story? I think there's a tremendous stress, certainly at the national level. There are fewer national non-profits. There are fewer social community-based research organizations that are doing research of this type.

I can't speak directly to the status at the provincial and municipal levels, but certainly there is a prevalent concern about the capacity of the community to continue to monitor and assess social and economic trends and to engage actively in policy and program debate.

The issue of information is a common concern across all sectors, and we hear this from colleagues across the country. We hear it from communities across the country, that we are losing our ability to tell the story of Canada in all of its complexity and diversity, and we remain committed to....

Yes, it's a huge problem, absolutely.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I guess, Michael, the reference you made to the amount of money dedicated to housing in the last budget was that it was not enough. It never is, actually. We're calling for a national housing strategy in the report you referenced.

How important will it be to organizations like yours and the municipalities you serve—and we can extrapolate here—to have the mandatory long form, as opposed to anything else, in determining where best to put this new housing?

[Michael Shapcott]

The mandatory long form gives us the vital information so that we know where housing needs are across the country. It's the basis for establishing core housing need.

I do want to say that while there's a general view that the $2.1 billion in the 2009 stimulus budget for affordable housing was not enough, it was actually very welcome at the same time, as was the $1.4 billion the federal government put into housing in 2006. Both of those were welcome. But one of the things we want to know is, what impact has that spending had? I'm sure everyone, and I think the government members too, based on their observations in this report, would like to have that information. It's accountability for results.

The way we measure results is by having these data sources over time. So if the core housing need goes down, because the government has actually been making investments in housing, and we think it actually should and would, then we actually have proof there's accountability for results.

So it's not just about assessing need and identifying where the issues are, but also about measuring government initiatives and their impact on communities. So for both of those reasons, it's very, very important to carry forward.

Core housing need, defined by Stats Canada, is a basket of measures of the standard of housing, overcrowding, and affordability, all combined together. Because it's based on the long-form census, we're able to get into local areas as well as getting a national picture of it. Therefore, you can actually target housing to the particular needs of local communities. In some communities, affordability is a bigger issue. In other communities, it may be repair or the standard of housing, or it may be issues of overcrowding. All those issues can actually be addressed very effectively, and then you can measure, after the fact, the accountability for the results. These are very important public policy tools that the long-form census allows us to use.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

You have two more minutes.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

You make a compelling case—for me anyway. All of you do, and certainly the panel before did. Some 15 pages of people, organizations, and groups have indicated their concern with this decision, and Mike listed some of the major or big organizations across the country that have written in to say this is not the way to go.

The question in my mind is, why are we doing this? There was a suggestion by an earlier group, the National Council of Women of Canada, in conversation with we me afterwards, that maybe what we're doing here is trying to clear the deck so that corporate interests can come in and mine that information, and then sell it back to municipalities and organizations.

Do you have any thoughts on that, if that's where we're going? First of all, have you heard or sensed that was where we were heading? And if that happened, what impact would it have?

[Peggy Taillon]

Certainly there's been a lot of discussion about that. One of the things people need to remember is that StatsCan is actually a revenue generator for the government. We purchase almost $1 million worth of data through a pan-Canadian consortium every five-year census cycle. There are all kinds of other organizations that are purchasing this data, and there have been some people in the private sector who have told me that they really question the decision, but they don't want to launch in because they see there's an opportunity for them to make some money if the long form is no longer there.

So that is a possibility, and I think one of the challenges is that there is nothing like the long-form census data out there. The long form is the source. It is the soundest source, the most comprehensive source, and there's nothing that's going to replace it, and certainly not in the short term. I think it was Don Drummond who told me that maybe 25 years from now we could have something comparable, based on what the government is proposing today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you.

Be very, very brief.

[Katherine Scott]

Very briefly, I'd also just like to add, though, that if we move into a climate where people no longer have access to the long form, in small communities in particular, these communities will go without. We may well, our large municipalities, try to attempt to generate their own comparable data collection, but for small communities across the country, or even medium-sized communities, they simply will not have the resources or access to generate this picture. It's not a stretch of the imagination to say that they will be flying completely blind on critical social economic policies because they will not have the resources to produce this information.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Komarnicki, please.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'll split my time with Mr. Vellacott. I'll get to some commentary, and then I'll have a question or two.

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association had this to say:

As a civil liberties organization, we're obviously concerned about the severity of the penalties that can be brought against citizens who do not fill out the census. We might question the policy justification for some of the more unusual questions that have been included in the past.

That's part of it.

Then a Lawrie McFarlane, former deputy minister of health in British Columbia, had this to say: “Institutions that use coercion in order to deal with people, characteristically have relationship difficulties with the people they deal with.”

I think Mr. Dryden summed it up when he said, “People don't get fined, and they don't go to jail. That's the point.”

The only reason you would fine or send people to jail is because you want to threaten them to do something that they otherwise might not be prepared to do. What has happened in this case is not a question of information; it's taking the information from one place and moving it to another place where it's voluntary. And I know you might not be experts and professionals in this, but a Darrell Bricker had this to say: “As far as I can see, the idea of going to a voluntary census, or actually a voluntary sample, carries with it certain risks. The question is whether they are unmanageable risks. Based on my professional experience”, he said, “doing this research all over the world, I can tell you there are people who manage these risks all the time quite successfully.”

Given that background, one of the questions that is perhaps interesting, and we've talked about some of that, is asking people what time they leave for work in the morning, for example, and how long it might take them. Specifically, if it were directed to a single mother with three children, the question would be, do you feel that persons like that should be exposed to a fine of any kind, or imprisonment, if they choose not to say when they leave for work in the morning? Perhaps Debra Lynkowski and Cordell could answer that question. Do you think they should be fined or they should be sent to prison for choosing not to answer that question, for whatever reason they have?

[Dr. Cordell Neudorf]

I think the basic issue that lies behind that is the difference between a voluntary and a mandatory census.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Right. If you don't have a fine or a penalty, as Mr. Dryden suggested, it's because people do have a civic responsibility and a duty, and there are professionals who say you can actually get the information you want on a voluntary basis without threatening or compelling people, and that seems reasonable.