Let me clarify a question, one that may be on some people's minds, by giving an analogy. We of course have voluntary surveys, lots of voluntary surveys; we have mandatory surveys; and we have a census. There could be a question as to why you would need a mandatory census if you have voluntary surveys.
I would say that we are like an auto manufacturer who produces passenger cars, SUVs, and 56-footers. We stand behind each one of our products. However, I would never recommend that somebody use a passenger car to deliver merchandise on a regular basis to a Wal-Mart, and I would not recommend to anybody to use a 56-footer with two people inside it to drive around the city of Ottawa. These things are produced for specialized purposes, and as long as they're used for that purpose, they are really great.
The difficulty with a voluntary survey as a replacement for a mandatory census is that, as my predecessor has explained, it does not capture the biases or deal with them. That would not be the case with a mandatory census. The reason we have those problems is that we know for a fact that there are certain geographical areas that would not provide the response rate one would want, and there are certain classes of individuals who have very low response rates. Indeed, these are exactly the people from whom you would want information if the government is to develop policies to deal with their issues. This would include aboriginals, people with low incomes, people with less education, visible minorities, and immigrants. Their response rates are quite low.
So a voluntary survey creates the problem that we will not get information from these groups, which of course will skew the averages in the overall research.
The other difficulty in a voluntary survey of a regular type is that when we get biases we can correct for those biases by comparing the information with the information available in a census. But if the census itself becomes voluntary, then there's no benchmark that one can use to actually fix the problem for the voluntary survey. That is the difficulty we would face.