Evidence of meeting #29 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was questions.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
Right off the bat, the municipalities have told us that when they're designing their water systems and they're designing the sewers, they use that. So yes, you could do without it, but then you're going to have a less efficient system.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
Okay.
It asks about annual household spending on shelter. That's important. And again, if someone doesn't want to answer that question, should they have to face a fine of $500?
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
Again I would have the same view. The fine itself is not the issue. There is a notion in Canada, and it has been well promoted and well understood, that filling out the census is mandatory. I don't think people look at the fine. The fines are not evoked very often. I don't think that's the notion.
The right notion, which people have understood in Canada, is that it's mandatory. The vast bulk of Canadians do it. I don't think they do it because of a threat of a fine, and we certainly do not need the threat of a jail sentence. We have not used it in Canada, it is not in place in other countries, and that has not caused a problem in compliance.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
So you're saying we could go without fines, then.
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
Oh, the fines probably have to be there on paper, but I think they're not really the central issue. If people understand that this is a benefit and is part of being a Canadian citizen, they will fill it out whether there are fines or not. They won't pay attention to the existence of the fines.
Conservative
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
The fines are there on paper. It's more of an attitude and it's a promotion of it. “Census day”: there has been a lot of promotion around that. There has been promotion that this is part of your duty as a Canadian. There are broader benefits to you as an individual: better shepherding of your government taxes, better benefits to other Canadians. If that's understood, I think that's the key.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
Right. Okay. So basically that's the approach that the government has put forward, and that sounds like the same approach that you're talking about—
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
No, it isn't.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
—because if we remove the fines, or if we don't enforce fines and make it public that we're not going to enforce fines, pretty much it's a voluntary system.
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
No. I think, first of all, the promotion would be different under those two, and I think you do need some measure, on paper at least, hopefully not used very much, of some kind of fines, but certainly not jail.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
We have annual household spending on transportation and annual household spending on food, for example, in addition to the other two. Do you think transportation and food are as important as water and shelter?
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
First of all, my general point—and we did release a letter yesterday, as part of the Statistics Canada national committee—is that we set out a number of principles for the questions. I think the principles are more important than individual questions.
We should go through each individual question and determine its importance, and more importantly, can the answers be given from other sources? Some of those can. Some of those can be removed over time. Some of them cannot be, so they would have to remain on the form.
But I don't think it's a black and white issue that the form should continue in its exact form or that it should be scrapped. We could look at it and certain things could be modified or dropped. The primary candidates are the three questions around the household activities, which in my view can be dropped.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
It does seem kind of interesting, because transportation and food are actually questions that are asked on voluntary surveys, so people don't have to answer those questions, yet shelter and water are mandatory questions in the long form. Does that make any sense to you? It seems there's kind of a grey area in terms of what questions are going to be mandatory and what questions are going to voluntary, don't you think?
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
But all the questions on the existing long form are mandatory, as they are in the short. So there is no grey area there at the moment.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
Right. So I get a call from Statistics Canada and they want me to tell them how much I spend on water or shelter and I get threatened with a $500 fine for not giving the answer, but if they ask me about transportation or food, I can clearly not answer that question and face no repercussions whatsoever.
What is less important about knowing what people spend on food than knowing what people spend on water?
Chair, Advisory Pannel on Labour Market Information, As an Individual
If there are questions on which the answers can be readily gotten from other sources and there is not a profound reason to believe there will be a bias in that response, they don't need to be on the long form of the census. That is the sort of deliberation that I think needs to take place.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
Let me move to Mr. Bricker, if I could, for a second.
You said that about 95% of the people fill out the long form now. Your survey said that 80% say that they would fill it out voluntarily, and that leaves 15%. I'm just curious about the 15% who will only fill it out under threat of jail time or fine, apparently. For that 15%, have there been any studies done in terms of what the reliability of that information they fill out is going to be? For example, there has been much reference to the 21,000 people who referred to Jedi Knights as their religion. Among that 15%, could that have resulted from a great number of that 15% just saying, “You know what? I don't really want to fill this out. Someone is telling me that I have to fill it out or they are going to send me to jail.” They spend 10 minutes, fill it out, and are done with it. How accurate does that sound to you?
President, Public Affairs, Ipsos Canada
There has been research done on this. I'm the guy here at the table who actually does surveys every day and deals with this in 25 countries. I can tell you that these are problems we confront all the time.
The most recent research on the issue of non-response is that actually the more strenuous you make the need to respond, the less reliable the data are. You can check the Pew foundation. They've done this research.
I'm a little concerned that Canada only has 21,000 Jedi whereas in the U.K. they have 390,000 who claimed that on their census forms.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you very much, Mr. Lake and Mr. Bricker.
We'll go to Mr. Angus.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chong.
I'm glad to have you here today, gentlemen. This should be a very dry and dull conversation--although no offence to statisticians; I'm sure you guys find it fascinating.
What I find fascinating is that here we are in a committee trying to go through line by line what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. It would seem to me that this is the kind of discussion that happens with the planners, with Statistics Canada, with the minister. We have a former minister here who signs off on the questions, so if there were objectionable questions in 2006, the man over there rubber-stamped them. The objectionable questions for 2011--
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Mr. Angus, I have a request for a point of order from Maxime Bernier.
Go ahead, Mr. Bernier.
Conservative
Maxime Bernier Conservative Beauce, QC
I would like him to withdraw his statement. It is totally false. The 2006 census was approved by the Liberal cabinet in 2005. So I am not the one who approved this census.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you, Maxime. That's not a point of order. I am not here to judge the veracity of anybody's comments.
Go ahead, Mr. Angus.