Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
I am representing Canada First Community Organization.
I just want to remind you gentlemen on this floor that it is a changing world. We are here to show support for the change.
I will not waste any time. I will just go into the topic.
Here are the reasons.
The adequacy of the long form is in doubt. It is 39 years old and a report that is 40 pages long. Some people may finish it anyway. Some of the answers they may not want to share with the government for privacy reasons and will simply just fill in what they like. How you are going to verify their information will be difficult.
I'm close to the community, so I'm just speaking on behalf of how they think.
All kinds of data are available, of which the long form is not the only source. It is old. In my opinion, it is inefficient and wastes time and money. I also feel sorry for the old way of getting things done; it is just terrible in terms of method and speed.
I just want to show you some examples of perhaps how to do things quickly as compared to slowly.
I'll give you the example of a subway extension from Yonge Street to Don Mills Road, along Sheppard Avenue. It took them 10 years to finish, as compared to Hong Kong, which built one of the largest airports, on two islands, on reclaimed land, back in the 1990s, which can handle 5,500 passengers an hour. What did they do? It cost $35 billion Canadian, and there actually were 10 projects along with that. There was the airport itself, a new town for its workers, a railway, two expressways, an underwater rail and road tunnel, and one of the longest suspension bridges in the world, longer than the Golden Gate Bridge, built in only eight years.
What I'm saying here is not to criticize the government; I'm saying that I want to see things get done more quickly and with less study.
I remind you that we have to compete globally. Just like the old Chinese saying, you are rowing your boat upstream, and if you don't row harder and faster, you may fall further and further behind and never be able to catch up.
The change of long form to a short form is a good direction to go in. Why not give it a try?
Some may say it's going to cost a lot of money. Yes. This form was first used in 1971. May I ask you gentlemen, are you still using your 1971 computer, or are you still driving your old car from 1971? So things need to change, and change in the direction of us having to compete globally.
If I may quote an article from The Economist, It is a global trend, pioneered, inevitably, in Scandinavia. Denmark has been keeping track of its citizens without a traditional census for decades; Sweden, Norway, Finland...among others....
The article goes on to say,Britain has seen hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrive from new eastern European members of the EU. Local governments complain that out-of-date information ignores these newcomers, leaving schools overcrowded, budgets stretched and houses scarce. At the same time, filling in the forms has become more onerous: what started as a short questionnaire about who lived where has turned into an inquisition about everything from toilet and car ownership to race and religion.
And it is costly. The cost is about $36 per head in America, versus 20ยข in Finland.
Thank you.