Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise again to talk about the Canadian census. There have been several debates on this issue over the last number of years, and Bill C-36 is the latest machination of that.
Basically, the census is a particularly important piece of information gathering that is critical for our economic, social, and societal planning. It is important to note that information collecting through the census is important for not only its particular use but also for other surveys and other types of public opinion research that are done on a multitude of issues, where the census is used to backstop those types of surveys, whether on agriculture, economics, public housing, or transit. As well, the census is important for our democracy. The fact is that it helps generate the information necessary for everything from locations and geography of where and how people live to the distribution of seats here in the House of Commons, as well as ensuring that different population-analysis requirements are looked at; for example, on issues of urban transit planning more recently, but also the use of land in Canada.
There is no doubt that there are dozens upon dozens of Canadian professional associations that support a solid, robust census: one that remains independent, protects personal privacy, and can be valuable, as well patterned so we can look at historical changes in all of the areas I mentioned before.
The challenge we have had in the previous Harper administration, the current one now to some degree, and more importantly, the past Liberal regimes has been the inconsistencies and anomalies from playing politics with the census.
The first I would mention is the ideological drive by the Liberals to outsource public service jobs. That was essentially the first attack on the census, in the sense that we had one of the best-recognized information gathering and census distribution systems in the world. In fact, I participated in the year 2000 complete count as a city councillor, because the area that I represented often had a lot of people with different languages, some of them had not become Canadian citizens at that time, and others were not part of the community because of university and college during the full time of when the census was distributed and when it was returned. As well, we had the fact of absentee and other landlords who decided not to respond to the census. That was during the Chrétien regime, and there was an attempt in a number of small areas, ones that I represented as councillor, to improve that so we did not miss out on opportunities to improve the interaction and activity with government. Then the Right Hon. Herb Gray represented the riding, and it was a good indication and a good measure of working together with the city and with me as a councillor on how to improve the response rate, which was less than 50%.
All that connects to Bill C-36 and what has taken place since that time, because I come from a time when it was not politicized. We saw that when the Martin regime of the Liberals wanted to privatize the census, it disrupted the long-standing and secure foundation that was set up nearly two decades before that, with regard to its implementation. In fact, Canada was often touted as one of those places to examine for census improvement.
However, the outsourcing to a private arms manufacturing company that was doing other privatization measures across the globe created certain problems when it actually went to implement that. First was the intervention of the Patriot Act in the United States. The Patriot Act breached Canadian privacy regulations because under the Patriot Act, U.S. companies are not allowed to tell clients that they are actually giving their information to the federal government of the United States.
Therefore, when the attempt was made to outsouce this to Minneapolis, if my memory serves me correctly, there was a long battle that took place in this House of Commons, with us as New Democrats, to retain that information in Canada. In fact, the contract ended up having to be amended so that the information was retained here.
Then we entered into the age of this outsourcing, which clearly became a problem for the many Canadians who were not supportive of it. However, we did not have the census in headlines until that time.
If we move forward to the next set of governments under the Harper administration, we quickly go through a number of different problems that emerged, the first and foremost being the move to a small census that was not mandatory. The challenge there and the outrage that we heard from a number of different scientific-based organizations, universities, and colleges with research capabilities was not only that the census information was at risk but that there was no doubt a break in the lineage that could be used to make further assessments and the continuity that was not there because we moved away from a long form stable census to that of a short-term short form one that certainly did not cut the mustard in any way, shape, or form. It became a controversy in the House of Commons for a number of years, eventually leading to the resignation of Munir Sheikh, who was the previous census chief executive officer. We have had other resignations since because there has been quite a connection between the political office and that of the census office.
I think that something of primary importance to Canadians is the recognition that we have—
