With your permission, being a long-term public servant and really, truly, non-political, I would not comment on the political side of the question. But it is quite appropriate for the government to determine the content of the census, and whichever government is in power has and will determine the content.
When I spoke out about the voluntary long-form census, it was not about whether or not the government has the right to decide what should get in the census, but whether it is inappropriate for any government to tell Statistics Canada how to do a survey, because that is a technical issue, and there is a long tradition, including United Nations resolutions, about the technical side of statistics having to be free of government interference. That is the only issue on which I spoke out. I am in total agreement with the tradition and the law that governments determine the content of the census. A political judgment goes into it, and that is entirely appropriate.