Thank you very much, Mr. Chair; and thank you to the witnesses for being here.
Just to provide a little bit of perspective, I find it quite astounding that, in the year 2010, here we are debating the triumph of ignorance over knowledge, but I guess that's where we are. I'd like to suggest that this is not just an academic, esoteric issue, but an issue affecting real people in real ways. I'd like to give two example of that and then ask the panel—perhaps Mr. McKinnon and Mr. Turk—whether they have other examples.
The first example is a friend of mine whose name is John Richards. He is a professor at Simon Fraser University who has been studying aboriginal issues, particularly education, for about five years. He told me that, if we didn't have the long-form census, we wouldn't even know how many aboriginals there were, let alone their situation vis-à-vis health and education. Since aboriginals are one of poorest groups of Canadians, I think that is important for good policy and that's a practical case.
The second example is my riding. Markham is hugely multicultural. About 40% of the people are Chinese. Maybe 15% or 20% are South Asian. There are many, many new Canadians. I think the new Canadians would also be under-represented, partly for linguistic reasons, in filling out a voluntary census. So they would be poorly served for the kinds of services, language training and other things, that new Canadians need when they come to Canada.
Those are two concrete examples of how real people, often disadvantaged people, would be negatively impacted.
Perhaps I could start with Mr. Turk. Can you give us other examples of that nature? I think it's important that we bring this down to reality so that people can understand why we're talking about this esoteric issue at such length.