Absolutely.
The question about the quality and type of housing that Canadians have has been some of the most used information from the census. Certainly CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, has done extensive research over the last 40 years, describing the Canadian housing stock, the quality of housing stock.
They've developed a measure of Canadians in need of core housing, which assesses the quality of their housing, whether they're overcrowded. Certainly the number of bedrooms in a home as compared to the population is how we determine whether there is significant overcrowding.
The census provides such detailed community-level data that we can then identify, for instance, aboriginal communities or smaller communities where there are significant housing problems. That's a very concrete example of how that question is used.
I happen to know, certainly in municipalities across the country, that the data on commute times is critical. Are people commuting to their places of work? How long does that take? What kind of urban infrastructure is in place to accommodate commuters? What is the time and the health impact on Canadians who drive an hour and a half to two hours per day, each way, to their places of work?
This information is critical in Canada, certainly in the largest three urban areas. I know for a fact that information is critically important to the cities of Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and certainly Calgary as well.
That particular information, for instance, was used by the City of Calgary when they attempted to look at the prevalence of transit poverty in that city during the boom before the last recession. They were finding that in the absence of good public transit, people were spending extraordinarily large sums of money on transportation because they couldn't afford to live adjacent to their places of work. They were talking about an emerging problem in Calgary called transit poverty.
This type of information is absolutely derived from the information on the long-form census. We can understand this at the community level. These are all very important things.