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.
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
They need not be threatened about their information becoming public.
Conservative
Tom Lukiwski Conservative Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK
No, but the question is that if they do not give you the information you ask for, they could be jailed or fined.
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
Well, they certainly wouldn't be jailed, because it has never happened in the history of the country. But could they be fined? Yes, absolutely.
Conservative
Tom Lukiwski Conservative Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK
Do you not believe, then, people might feel threatened because of that?
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
If they make any offence against Canadian law, they will be prosecuted under Canadian law, like any other Canadian.
Conservative
Tom Lukiwski Conservative Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK
But my question then, sir, is that if they do not divulge the private information, or information that they may consider to be private, and they are threatened with imprisonment or threatened with a fine, do you not feel that they may take some offence to that? And some Canadians may feel that this threat is real.
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
Or they may take offence to it--and that wasn't the question. My question, to which I answered unambiguously, was do they have any reason to fear for the information that they provide to the census about their personal security and safety? The answer is unambiguously no.
Conservative
Tom Lukiwski Conservative Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK
It doesn't really matter whether or not their information is released publicly. The real threat to them is whether or not they could be fined or imprisoned.
Conservative
Tom Lukiwski Conservative Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK
So you agree with me that they could feel threatened because of that.
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
I agree with you and I agreed with the previous statement, because those are two very different questions.
Conservative
Tom Lukiwski Conservative Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK
So at least we've got the premise of the difference of opinion here, because what we have been stating is that we do not believe it is appropriate for Canadians to feel threatened and be forced to divulge what they may consider to be private information. We believe that the information that you require--and we agree that the information serves a very useful purpose--can be gleaned through other methods rather than coercion or threats of imprisonment.
If you receive that information, which is very valuable, and it was given on a voluntary basis--because the government was able to persuade the Canadian public that this information was important--then it wouldn't impact your work whatsoever, would it? You would have the information that you require.
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
That's a conditional statement with which I agree--given the condition. Our experience is that response rates to voluntary surveys are hugely different from compulsory surveys, on the order of 60% to 70% for most of our surveys. Secondly, those response rates are falling.
So I would be very concerned about any comparability between data that are collected in one year on a compulsory basis--a compulsory basis with response rates close to 100%--and in another year with response rates that may be only 60% to 70%.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll be sharing my time with my colleague Mr. Gravelle.
Gentlemen, I'm very glad to have you here. I'm certainly disturbed, especially in your case, Mr. Sheikh, that you have to be here under these circumstances. I hope you will be kind with us, because as politicians we are extreme generalists. We don't know--none of us here knows--the best methodology for statistical accounting. That's not our job. Our job is to rely on, as you said, Mr. Sheikh, the non-partisan, professional civil service. This is what separates us from oligarchies, what separates us from dictatorships; we don't rely on sycophants, we rely on professional civil servants to give us advice.
Mr. Sheikh, you said the first step in the census is the consultation with stakeholders in order to develop anything. I tried to find out from the minister who the stakeholders he met with were. He did not meet with the Privacy Commissioner. He's refused to meet with key economists, the banks, the social planners.
So that leaves us...that he relied on advice from your department. The minister made very clear that he had the support of your department in not just scrapping the mandatory census but also monkeywrenching with the questions, depending on what the Conservatives believed was intrusive or not.
Yet you were forced to resign because, as you said in your statement this morning, your number one job is to protect the credibility of the agency. Is that a fair assessment of why you had to resign, given the minister's comments that he had the support of Statistics Canada for these changes?
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
To go back to the day I resigned, there were stories in the media, particularly in The Globe and Mail, which had a headline on page 4 that said the chief statistician supports what the government is planning to do.
As I think I said earlier, my job was to give the best possible advice to the government. It is the government's right to make a decision as to what policies should be implemented. While we may have a different view from the government, it is my responsibility to implement that decision. So whatever the decision of the government was, Statistics Canada was going to implement that decision to the best of their ability.
The minister spoke about a need for balance. The minister has every right to want that balance. The issue for us is the quality of our data. Even there, the government has to acknowledge, as the minister did, that they are the ones who make decisions, not the public servants.
The reason I stepped aside is because of some media stories that Statistics Canada was not just implementing the decision of the government but was actually recommending that to the government.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Just to clarify, it's the minister's right to make a decision and it's your duty to implement that decision, but it's not the minister's right to misrepresent your role at Statistics Canada and pretend that it was your idea or that you supported it. Am I not correct?
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
Well, I don't really want to comment on the minister saying whatever he said, or misrepresenting it, because I don't really know what the minister said. What I'm really going on is the stories that emerged in the media.
But regardless of what the minister said, even if the minister had not said what was reported in the media, the fact that in the media and in the public there is this perception that Statistics Canada is supporting a decision that no statistician would, it really casts doubt on the integrity of that agency, and I, as the head of that agency, cannot not survive in that job
So it doesn't really matter what the minister said. It is what the perception is out there; that really is the deciding factor.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you, Mr. Sheikh.
Mr. Angus, do you want to yield the floor to Mr. Gravelle?
NDP
Claude Gravelle NDP Nickel Belt, ON
Mr. Sheikh, I'd like to commend you for being here today. I know it's quite stressful for you to be here today, so thank you.
Minister Clement said that he had the support of Statistics Canada. When the minister says that, you would think it means he has the support of the manager or the chief statistician of Statistics Canada. So what happened between the time that Mr. Clement said he had the support of Statistics Canada and the day that you resigned? Was he misrepresenting your views?
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
Again, I'd like to emphasize that I actually don't know what the minister said. I don't know whether or not what he actually said was misrepresenting whatever advice we may have given him.
The point is that Wednesday morning, when I read the story in the media, they started to cast doubt on StatsCan's integrity. It is what I read in The Globe and Mail. As I've said a couple of times, it doesn't matter to me what the minister said; it is what perception is out there and what Canadians believe in that will have an impact on whether I can do my job.
After that story appeared, by the end of that same day, I had resigned from my job. There's a fairly straightforward process for doing that.
NDP
Claude Gravelle NDP Nickel Belt, ON
All right.
Mr. Fellegi, the government refers to the threat of imprisonment often enough when discussing the census. During your 51 years of service, how many Canadians were imprisoned for refusing to fill out the census form?
Former employee of Statistics Canada, As an Individual
None, and to the best of my knowledge, never anytime before, either. I sometimes jokingly say I've been chief statistician since Confederation. I haven't been chief statistician since Confederation, but I looked at the record, and to the best of my knowledge, there have not been any.
This is an old act, and I want to call your attention to it again, because I hope we can turn our attention to where we go from here. There is a set of very constructive proposals on the table from the National Statistics Council on moving forward. We are facing a problem. The census is literally around the corner, and we have just days for any alternatives to be considered. The alternatives presented by the National Statistics Council of 40 extremely eminent people appointed by the minister seek to address the issue that the member raised and Munir Sheikh has emphasized, which is the right of the government to protect privacy, to establish the right balance.
They are proposing to address those concerns and at the same time safeguard the integrity of the next census. Give us some time, then, beyond that, for consultation and a thoughtful consideration of alternatives--all kinds of alternatives, international examples and others.