I think the word “hurt” is probably too strong. I think what we'd end up doing is we'd end up misallocating resources. The reason for asking a lot of the questions is because we have government programs and we have other important stakeholders in Canada who allocate resources based on the census. If you have biased information, you're going to misallocate resources. On the other hand, a lot of the groups that we suspect may be less likely to reply, be they people at lower income levels or new immigrants, may be the ones who will not be targeted for programs that are important.
I would also worry about the response in rural areas. The populations in rural areas are diminishing. A lot of very important decisions depend on this. I was recently in rural Manitoba, and there the issue was projecting school enrollment looking at education data in a municipality. They were trying to determine whether they could keep their high school.
I look at the kind of investment decisions made using the data. One example brought to my attention recently was that Toyota made a decision to locate its plant in a certain part of Ontario after having looked at the education data of the population from which they would be drawing their workers. They chose that spot in Canada as opposed to a place in the United States. Their reasoning was that there would be lower costs involved in training the workers.
So decisions will be made; unfortunately, they will not be made with the best information available.