Sure. Those are all good questions. It's very difficult to provide forward-looking information because you don't know the future. You don't have data on the future of course.
But what we heard from members, particularly on StatsCan industry survey information and so on, is that timeliness tends to be an issue. They are getting information about a sector that's now two or three years old. Are they getting a whole lot of information out of that? This is the difficulty with any sort of data collector, and we have had long discussions with StatsCan on this to find solutions.
We thank them for taking this very seriously. But the good information about industries and sectors can only come from industries or businesses, and people filling out these surveys. The difficulty level can be quite high, and the burden can be quite high.
To a large degree and as much as it is able, StatsCan is getting administrative data from other sources—CRA and so on—and trying to keep the load as light as possible on the smallest businesses, particularly those in smaller economic areas, whether it's smaller provinces, the territories, and so on.
If you want more complete information about a sector, you actually have to go survey them, and that puts more of a burden on collecting information. This is one of the reasons why we really pushed for getting free information back to the businesses because if they were providing this information for free to government, then at least they should be getting this information back as quickly as possible and without cost as well. They are the ones providing much of the data that is then being repackaged, and developed, and so on.
So yes, we understand. I did say forward-looking but....