Thank you, Mr. Garneau.
One of the most critical things the long-form census provides is small-area information. It's fine to talk to Canadians about the abstract and the importance of the labour force survey tackling questions such as efficiency in our economy, but the biggest impact on individuals is in terms of the services that are directly provided to them.
We heard, for example, criticism earlier of the question about where do you go to work and when do you leave there. However, it is precisely questions such as this that may have some interest at a national level, but at a neighbourhood level, will allow people to see where we need roads and how we can best plan our transit system. The lists of people you heard about earlier, the different organizations, tend to be the service deliverers who bring home local neighbourhood solutions and answers to people.
The information that gets generated allows for more efficiency, and even accountability. I think those are two benchmarks that are extremely important to the broader Canadian public and should be held up as things that drive government policy: First, they're made vastly more difficult without the precise and detailed information we have; and secondly, the alternative ways of getting this information are usually inadequate and invariably more expensive. So when we're talking about large numbers to conduct a census, in fact the alternatives tend to be vastly more expensive.