Thank you, Madam Chair.
This may have come up earlier--I know it has within the chamber over there a bit as well--but to suggest that because we don't have the mandatory long-form census we're not going to get information required for tracking some of these things, such as economic security, labour markets, and social program development for Canadians living on the cusp of poverty.... In fact, some of the Scandinavian countries for close to a decade have not had a census, because they're able to collate, correlate, and bring together material from the computer age we live in. The members opposite as well as on this side of the table obviously should be aware of this.
It almost seems like a bit of a time warp here. I would suggest and it would seem to me that the modern countries--democracies, if you will--have moved beyond taking a census in the old traditional way, because they have ways of linking or bringing together all the information that is required. But as well, as my colleague says, the long-form census will still be done, just not with the force of the law and the strictures that presently exist.
People should do a little bit of personal reading on this. The industry committee, which has looked at it, would be pretty adequate. If more personal reading needs to be done on it, people could get a pretty good understanding of how Sweden and Norway and some of these other countries--left-leaning countries that have every bit as much, and some would suggest even more, interest in those issues as our country has.... And they get all that information.
There are ways to work with the provinces, I would think, Madam Chair, in terms of correlating information and getting agreements so that we could get all this very adequate information. In fact, it might be a superior method. Somehow we seem to be in a little bit of a time warp and a little bit out of date almost, it occurs to me. I suggest modestly that other advanced countries with modern computer technology and so on use other methods to get the very same information and can bring those to bear in terms of all these areas that Mr. Savage is concerned about--labour market, social program development, economic security, and so on--and they don't lack any of it, as Mr. Lessard seems to imply.
I think that would be good reading for all of us.