I'm not sure that the long-form.... I mean, I've been quite vocal about the long-form census, but I'm not really sure it falls under the purview of this committee or around the debate around open data.
What I would say is that the information collected by StatsCan is enormously valuable to not just the government but also a huge number of non-profits and companies. We need to be thinking about that data as an asset for making our economy stronger, our social sector stronger, and making our government more effective and more efficient. When we choose to limit the amount of information that we collect, we limit all of those sectors and how effective they can be.
So I think that's something that needs to have some real debate. Mostly, though, whether the long-form census data is included or not, more importantly, I think, we need to think about how we're going to get StatsCan data shared with the public in open formats--for free, because they've already paid for it.