Status of Women committee  We want to thank the committee for inviting Statistics Canada to appear today. I will be reading from a prepared text. In regard to the 2011 census and the national household survey, I would point out that on June 26, 2010, the census questions were published in the Canada Gaz

Status of Women committee  I'll just comment on the consultations to begin with. We do extensive consultations leading up to each census. We start about three or four years prior to the census and do consultations. We put out a consultation guide. It's on our website. It's quite a public process. We consul

Status of Women committee  We can table it in terms of the organizations we consulted and some of the feedback we received, but we can't attribute the specific responses.

Status of Women committee  Well, we don't deny that this is an important topic. We're fully aware of that, and we don't deny that information on unpaid work is not needed; it is needed. But what we heard was that it was the data in the general social survey that users were using and that it was a much more

Status of Women committee  All of those surveys are voluntary, except for the labour force survey, which is mandatory.

Status of Women committee  All the data released by Statistics Canada is of high quality and is very comprehensive.

Status of Women committee  Yes, well, it depends on what the user is looking for and what the research question is as well. Different survey vehicles provide different types of information. For example, on the general social survey, the time use diary is a very different vehicle or way to collect the infor

Status of Women committee  Yes. In particular, the general social survey is a survey we do annually. And it is on different topics, such as, for example, families or victimization. One of those cycles is the time use cycle, and that's conducted every five years. We started in 1992. The time use diary col

Status of Women committee  Yes, based on the feedback we got, the GSS was being used more frequently.

Status of Women committee  With the GSS, we have collected that information consistently over about 20 years. That will be the way in which we look at it. We always release the GSS by looking at the consistency back with the past information we have collected. That will provide us with the information to k

Status of Women committee  In terms of the guide, as we always do going into consultations, the one in 2000 and each census look at all the content, so it wasn't just specifically this issue. There are other issues that we raise in the guide, so it's always re-looking at the census content. Is it relevant?

Status of Women committee  Yes. It was a broader look at the census and the content, and it was one issue that came up.

Status of Women committee  I can't, off the top of my head, know that, and sometimes it's not necessarily that we were consulting specifically on unpaid work. When we start off the consultations, it's on all the content, so those comments may have come up as we were consulting on the entire census question

Status of Women committee  Are you referring to the sample size?

Status of Women committee  I think the sample size is about 25,000.