Thank you for this opportunity.
On July 6, on behalf of the executive of the Canadian Economics Association, I wrote a letter to Minister Clement asking for consultation on the census change and offering to do anything we could to assist. The letter makes the argument that the voluntary approach risks serious non-response bias and concludes that if there is inadequate time for such consultation, our view is that the risk of losing the embedded value in the census is too great and that the change should be delayed.
The elimination of jail time and fine reduction was also suggested, as was running mandatory and voluntary surveys in parallel so that a subsequent decision regarding voluntary surveys could be based on evidence.
The letter was respectful of the intrusiveness issue, and I would like to add that, as a person, I am also respectful of that issue. The problem is entirely the risk to the quality of data.
I would like to make one final remark, based on previous testimony to the committee, of July 27, when Mr. Bricker, a pollster, gave you the number that a likely response rate was 80%, based on his polling.
I'd like to point out that this number is probably biased high, because of course, it is the response to a voluntary poll, and people who aren't interested in responding to polls are likely just not to respond. So there's a problem with that number.
There have been test censuses run. The only published number that I'm aware of is for the 2008 test census, which had a response rate of 46%. Test censuses are done on a voluntary basis. I view that number as almost surely too low.
The point is that it's very hard to know exactly what the response rate is going to be, and I think you should know that in your deliberations.
Thank you very much.