Bill C-568 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Statistics Act (mandatory long-form census)

This enactment amends the Statistics Act to provide that the census of population taken under section 19 of the Act must be taken using a long-form census questionnaire that conforms substantially, in length and substantive scope, to the census starting in 1971 and at intervals thereafter to meet the requirements of that section. This enactment also removes the punishment of imprisonment for a person convicted of the offence of providing false or misleading information.

Statistics Act

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Madam Speaker, let me begin my remarks by quoting someone who has been much quoted in the ongoing debate about the 2011 census, the former chief statistician, Ivan Fellegi. In an address to the International Statistical Institute in 2003, he said, “Privacy was generally defined as the right to be left alone, to be free from interference, from surveillance and from intrusion”. He went on to say:

Information privacy involves the right to control information about oneself. At its heart lies informed consent: the right to give or deny consent for the use of information about oneself. In this sense all compulsory household surveys are clearly privacy intrusions.

This is one point on which Ivan Fellegi and I can agree. Perhaps we also agree that there has been a growing concern in official statistics in Canada and internationally about the use of coercion in government data collection. Many countries have removed imprisonment from the penalties imposed on individuals and businesses refusing to participate in government surveys that are conducted on a mandatory basis. Some countries, where their administrative data systems permit, have chosen to dispense with surveys.

In the 1980s, Canada showed international leadership by introducing the notion into the Statistics Act that surveys could be conducted on a voluntary basis. Statistics Canada then showed leadership by making the vast majority of its household surveys voluntary.

For over 20 years now, Statistics Canada has been releasing useful and usable data and information from those voluntary surveys. For over 20 years, governments, organizations, businesses and individual Canadians have been using that information to help them make informed decisions on everything ranging from new programs to new products.

A few countries have made specific questions, such as questions on religion, voluntary, even in their censuses. This government has taken the next logical step in this progression by looking into the census itself and recognizing that some questions are sufficiently intrusive that Canadians should not be legally compelled to answer them.

The bill we are debating today is regressive. It seeks to restore legal compulsion for all census questions, however intrusive. For this reason, it must be rejected.

The Parliament of 1970, which adopted the current Statistics Act, showed wisdom in crafting its terms. It recognized in section 21 that questions that would be asked in a census of an entire population on a mandatory basis with severe legal penalities for non-compliance should be approved not by civil servants but by elected officials.

In reviewing proposals for the 2011 census, this government has taken its responsibilities very seriously. We do not believe the government's role in the approval of census questions should be to rubber-stamp proposals from the chief statistician. This is not what Parliament intended. We reviewed the proposals carefully in coming to our decision.

Let us be clear on what our government decided. We concluded that some of the questions proposed for the 2011 census of population were sufficiently important that they should continue to be asked on a mandatory basis. These are the questions necessary to establish the population of the country, information that is needed for the definition of electoral districts and to determine inter-governmental transfer payments involving billions of dollars. They are also the questions that will provide the information necessary to provide government services to local communities in the official language of their choice.

We similarly decided that all questions proposed to the 2011 census of agriculture should be asked on a mandatory basis in order to support extensive government programs and policy interventions in this sector.

The government also decided, as a matter of fundamental principle, that the remaining questions proposed for the 2011 census of population were too intrusive to be asked of Canadians on a mandatory basis. The government recognized the utility for all governments and many other organizations of the information that would have been derived from the remaining questions.

It is for this reason that the government asked Statistics Canada to develop options to collect this information through a voluntary survey. It is for this reason the government then selected, approved and funded one of these options.

We understood also that there would be consequences for data quality, but we have worked, and will continue to work, with Statistics Canada to ensure that we will obtain the best possible results from the voluntary national household survey. We have great faith in our world-leading statistical agency to find the means that will ensure this new survey will meet the needs of the greatest possible number of users. We will of course learn from 2011 to improve future cycles of the census and the survey.

This bill seeks to turn back the hands of the clock. It fails to respect the privacy of Canadians and their right to refuse to participate in a survey when they cannot be persuaded that the public purpose of the inquiry justifies the surrender of their personal information. It seeks to transfer to a public servant decisions that clearly belong to elected officials. The government cannot support these aspects of the bill.

There is one point on which the government can concur with the bill, however, and that is with respect to the removal of imprisonment as a penalty for Canadians who refuse to participate in surveys that are mandatory under the Statistics Act.

Other developed countries around the world have already taken this step and it is time for Canada to join them. We are pleased to see that other members of the House have rallied to the government's view on this issue. Unfortunately, the bill is incomplete in removing the sanction of imprisonment. Other sections of the act also contain this penalty. The government will be bringing forward legislation of its own to completely remove this penalty for non-compliance with mandatory surveys conducted under the Statistics Act.

I urge my hon. colleagues to do the right thing for Canadians and reject this bill.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased today to speak to Bill C-568, An Act to amend the Statistics Act (mandatory long-form census).

I will read the summary of the bill so that the viewing public can understand it:

This enactment amends the Statistics Act to provide that the census of population taken under section 19 of the Act must be taken using a long-form census questionnaire that conforms substantially, in length and substantive scope, to the census starting in 1971 and at intervals thereafter to meet the requirements of that section. This enactment also removes the punishment of imprisonment for a person convicted of the offence of providing false or misleading information.

I congratulate the member, who is a long-standing member of the House, for introducing this bill.

When the government announced its initiative many months ago, I got the impression that most people, even Conservatives that I talked to among members of the public, felt it was the most boneheaded move the government had made since the killing of the prison farms.

Generally speaking, the public settles down based on ideology and their voting patterns. When the government of their choice introduces something, they try to understand what the government is doing. By and large, they find a way to accept, if they are Conservatives, what their government is doing and work out a rationale for it.

However, these are two issues, which I find from talking to Conservatives, that just leave them puzzled. They cannot explain why the government has done it and they do not agree that the prison farms should have been eliminated. They certainly do not agree that the census should be changed.

That aside, many organizations have the same view on this matter. There are business organizations across the country that require the statistics provided by the census in order to conduct proper business operations.

As the Liberal member mentioned previously, in his attempt to find out why the government was doing this, he looked at the cost of it and said that the government is spending $30 million more to get less reliable data. It does not make sense.

Then I looked back to a question that I asked on September 28. We were looking at best practices. I like to talk about best practices. That is the hallmark of Conservatives. Whatever line of business we are talking about, computers, IT issues, it is always best practices and they are lined up with Conservatives.

Well, the best practices here would seem to be the United States. The Conservatives seem to want to follow where the United States is going, and they are always six months or six years behind. I do not know whether the member has checked this out or not, but back in 2003 when George Bush was the president, the Americans tried this experiment. The U.S. Census Bureau conducted an experiment and found that the data was degraded so much that fixing it would be too expensive and it abandoned the idea.

What sort of planning is the government involved in and what sort of planning did it do to develop this approach?

We know what the approach was. It was a knee-jerk ideological approach to the problem. The Conservatives had a preconceived notion. Their Conservative ideology tells them that this census is an irritant to a certain number of their supporters, and they probably heard from a few of them over the years.

I am sure it is the libertarian part of the party that is flexing its muscles at this point. The libertarians have not had a lot of support from the government over the last four or five years as it races to recoup as much of the centre ground from the Liberals that it could get its hands on. Every once in a while the Conservatives throw some red meat at the libertarians in their group.

That is the only reason the Conservatives would have taken this measure. The public does not support what they are doing.

The Joe Clark government seemed to have suicidal tendencies from day one. That was the government that started sending pension cheques to federal prisoners. We have not seen that suicidal tendency in the Conservative Party over the years, but we are certainly seeing it now.

Practically every business organization in the country is opposed to the government's approach on the census. School boards are opposed to the idea. Pretty much each and every province is opposed to the idea. Members over there might be able to tell me that one province is onside with respect to this issue. My home province of Manitoba is not in favour of this approach to the census. If the government is trying to get allies, if it is trying to build support, then it does not make any sense to torch its relationships.

We support this bill because it seeks to reverse the ideologically-based decision of the Conservative government to cancel the long form census. It would remove imprisonment of a person convicted of providing false and misleading information. That is an issue. Nobody has ever spent time in jail for failing to provide information with respect to the census, but the idea that it was possible may have weighed heavily on some people when they were asked to provide information.

While we support the bill, it really does not go far enough. Bill C-583 put forward by our colleague from Windsor West goes one step further. It would enshrine in law the primacy of evidence-based decision making over political manoeuvring of the likes we have seen with the government. We have seen political manoeuvring by the government not only with respect to this issue but with respect to a whole range of other areas. The Conservatives have fired people, sometimes people that they hired, who do not see things their way. They hired the victims' advocate three years ago and when he did not act the way he promised on victims' support, they simply fired him. They will get somebody who sees things their way.

As I have indicated, no Canadian has been imprisoned for failing to fill out the long form census. That would be removed if this bill were to pass. We have to remove political interference in the process. The chief statistician has to be able to do his or her job in an environment free of political meddling by an ideological government, certainly one like the Conservative government which is intent on suppressing evidence and information that contradicts its own narrow agenda.

Imagine the outrage from Canadians and the international community if the finance minister had interfered with the independence of the Governor of the Bank of Canada to set monetary policy. Why should we accept the government's heavy-handedness by interfering with our chief statistician's capacity to do his or her job?

As I have indicated, hundreds of individuals, organizations, businesses, governments from coast to coast, certainly an apolitical group of people have raised alarm bells about the terrible decision to cancel the long form census--

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Order, please. The hon. member's time has expired.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for St. Paul's for her reply.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank all hon. members for speaking to the bill. I also thank the Speaker for his excellent ruling that the bill does not require a royal recommendation and therefore we hope to be voting on it and getting it to committee as quickly as possible so that we can get this bill into law.

The bill speaks to the government's failure in two ways. What it is doing is harmful and unthinkable. How it has done it is the absolute worst of what we are seeing in the government in terms of its undemocratic approach and its approach to the citizens of this country.

It is the ultimate, top-down, misguided, father-knows-best paternalism that we have seen since coming to this place. This seems to have been on the bucket list of the Prime Minister, who does not want to measure things, does not want to know where there is inequality, does not want to have to remedy things that are wrong, because in some ways that is just what the census is. It is a report card on how we are doing in our country and how we are dealing with inequalities in our country.

The members opposite show audacity trying to prove that it does not really matter and that this is an issue of privacy. I would think the former Chief Statistician would be appalled that the member for Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar would be using his name and a quote from him to defend something that he is so vehemently opposed to. It is a disgrace. She is switching the words about privacy in a way that is dishonest and misleading to Canadians.

The thing about the census is that it is anonymous data. If people do not want the government to know what religion they are, the government will not know what religion they are after they have filled out the census. It is the continued use of the words “intrusive” and “coercive” that have been so destructive. As we learned this morning in the access to information, because of this ongoing litany of “coercive” and “intrusive” from the minister and the members opposite, there is serious concern, and there was serious concern expressed last year, that this ongoing disrespect for the need for a mandatory census will actually do a disservice to the short form census and even that will end up having less accurate data.

As was said this morning by The Canadian Press:

One of the key worries was that people might think that the basic census form, which asks Canadians where they live, their ages, sexes and the language they speak, was also voluntary.

“Many Canadians may interpret the voluntary long form as applying as well to the mandatory short form,” reads the briefing note, released under the Access to Information Act.

“This would, in Statistics Canada's view, create an unacceptable risk to the credibility of the population count derived from the short-form census.”

If fewer people fill out the short form, the statistics agency warned it would affect federal transfers to the provinces and the distribution of Commons seats

That is what the government seems to be trying to confuse us with in terms that even Bill C-12 would not work without a proper response to the census, and it is time that it brought Bill C-12 back to the House as well.

The article goes on to say that the number of Canadians filling out the forms potentially could decrease by as much as 40%.

The word “mandatory” also places an obligation on the government to follow up. I think the most poignant testimony we had at the industry committee this summer was from ITK's Elisapee Sheutiapik, who said there was an amazing partnership that had developed in the Arctic communities, and about how, even though they are a community intimidated by forms, particularly because some of the elders do not speak English, that having someone who has been trained through Stats Canada going house to house, they are very comfortable having that person come and help fill out those forms, and they want to Canadians to know that there is an average of 16 people living in that house and that is unacceptable.

So as we go forward, it is a matter of saying that the government has refused to honour the opposition day motion. We hope that it will, for once, as the Prime Minister said so many times before, honour the will of the House and do the right thing, enshrine it in the Statistics Act and get on with the 2011 census that we all need.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

The time provided for debate has expired.

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And five or more members having risen:

Pursuant to Standing Order 93, the recorded division stands deferred until Wednesday, December 8, 2010, immediately before the time provided for private members' business.

It being 2:15 p.m., the House stands adjourned until next Monday at 11 a.m. pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 2:15 p.m.)