Thank you.
Chair, members of the committee, and other participants, I'm pleased to be here to represent Campaign 2000. As you may know, we're a non-partisan cross-Canada network of more than 120 national, provincial, territorial, and community groups committed to raising awareness about child and family poverty and proposing practical solutions.
We appear today in support of the long-form census, a critical part of the statistical system that provides for accurate data at the national, provincial, and small-area level. It's collected, from our point of view, at a reasonable cost to government, and from all we know and have read, it respects well the privacy of Canadians and protects information. In fact, I know that clearly from looking at the data, where you see numbers of suppressed cells, particularly in smaller provinces. To our knowledge, that privacy has never been breached by well-respected Statistics Canada.
Our specific recommendations—and then I'm going to talk about our rationale—urge the committee to indeed use its powers to ensure that the mandatory long-form questionnaire is included in the 2011 census of Canada. We support the government-appointed National Statistics Council in its August 12, 2010 statement that sets out a series of proposals for the long-form census, including removing the threat of jail from the long form and setting out a regular and transparent process for reviewing current questions and adding new questions for future censuses.
We also support the proposal to amend Canada's Statistics Act as was set out in a letter in September to the Prime Minister from Ivan Fellegi, former chief statistician; David Dodge, former Governor of the Bank of Canada; and two former Clerks of the Privy Council, Mel Cappe and Alex Himelfarb. I should say that we've reviewed that in order to assist us in making this decision.
Our coalition is a network representing low-income people, those providing services in health, housing, child care, education, food security, child welfare, as well as faith communities, women's groups, labour organizations, social planning councils, and many others. As you may or may not know, Family Service Toronto is our lead partner and host, and that's where I work. I'm going to talk a bit about my Toronto work later on.
Each year we do a report card, which you're probably familiar with. In addition to doing the national report card, we coordinate our partners in seven provinces who do report cards on the provincial situation with regard to poverty. One of my tasks is to coordinate the acquisition and distribution of data. As you know, the importance of clear, reliable, and consistent data is central to making convincing arguments on many issues, in particular, poverty and low-income status.
Whether we're the food bank people, the child care providers, the affordable housing providers, or health care providers, we work with people every single day and see the situations face to face on a one-to-one basis. But we know that objectivity and credibility of the data are what we need to try to make the case with people like yourselves and provincial legislators across the country.
So we rely on Statistics Canada's sound data and we also work with a community social data strategy that the Canadian Council on Social Development coordinates. So we're quite distressed with the removal of the long-form census because we see it as limiting our ability to illustrate the true statistical picture of poverty in Canada, and it will also limit the planning of many of our service-delivery partners. You're probably aware that in many situations, data for the Atlantic provinces is often not available on anything other than the census because the sample is too small and is considered by Statistics Canada as not acceptable for release. So our partners use the data in their local trends.
We at Family Service Toronto use the neighbourhood profiles that the City of Toronto prepares using data from the long-form census. I wanted to illustrate one particular way in which the lack of the long-form census data will impact our work and I think the bigger picture regarding children living in poverty in Canada, and that's on a chart that I actually.... I don't know if you got it; I e-mailed it to the clerk yesterday. It's a chart that we did regarding child poverty rates for selected social groups over three different censuses, 1996, 2001, and 2006.
Do you have the chart there?
