Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let me start by explaining why I'm here. I am indeed the president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, but I spent over 30 years in the public service of Canada. I served seven prime ministers. I was the Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet to Mr. Chrétien, but lest you think that somehow taints me as being a partisan in anyway, the first order in council naming me to the deputy minister ranks was by Brian Mulroney, and I ended my career in the public service loyally serving Prime Minister Harper and my then minister, Peter MacKay. So in the spirit of that non-partisan public service, my objective today is to try to help the committee deal with the government's objectives, as well as the opposition's objectives, and I think both can be met.
I've sent the Prime Minister and Minister Clement four letters. I never received a response from Minister Clement, and the Prime Minister's Office sent me an acknowledgement.
However, I never received a response from the Prime Minister. Even though my last letter was private, I would like to share it with the committee because, clearly, the Prime Minister never saw it.
I have four points.
The first point is that the long form of the census is a public good. That's a technical term, but it's a good one. It's used by a wide array of real people: banks, charities, and public health authorities.
I'll just use one example that I'm familiar with. My wife is the president of the Canadian Institute of Planners, and whether they're urban or municipal planners, they use this material all the time to plan municipal and rural infrastructure, transportation systems, for development planning, sewers, all of that. This is a public good. It serves the public and can be more efficiently collected by the state than by each individual group undertaking its own survey.
Second, the long form of the census ensures the reliability and robustness of other surveys. The Governor of the Bank of Canada has made it clear that he's going to have to reassess the reliability of the labour force survey now that we will have a voluntary long-form census. The labour force survey, by the way, is a compulsory survey, but we rely on it for measuring employment and unemployment. We need to have the long-form census to target other censuses to have reliability.
Third, I'm going to be presumptuous and suggest that I know what the objectives of this committee are, and I'm going to tell you what they are. I apologize for appearing presumptuous, but I think you should be out there to provide reliable and robust data, and also to minimize coercion. I agree with the government on this; we should be minimizing coercion. We should be minimizing the intrusiveness of the survey and the census, and we should be maximizing the privacy that's attached to it.
I have one more point that I'll come back to, but in my letter to the Prime Minister—and I've asked the clerk to share the letters with the members of the committee—I indicate there are four things you can do to deal with those objectives: You can have a mandatory census; you can remove jail terms, and now I think both sides agree with this; you can review the questionnaire and minimize the intrusiveness of the questions; and I would add to what the National Statistics Council has said, you can increase the penalties for the divulgation of private data. I think anybody who releases census data inappropriately should be seriously fined.
The last issue I want to present to the committee is that there's a higher-level issue here and it is an important principle of governance: to ensure the integrity of the statistical agency. I think the events over the course of this summer have raised questions about this larger significant issue. I think the committee should take its time, notwithstanding the deliberations on the census, to consider the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.
To my surprise, there are UN fundamental principles of official statistics. It was brought to my attention by Ivan Fellegi, the former Chief Statistician. This summer we've seen questions raised about who's responsible for methodology in collecting statistics. There are several principles in that UN charter that deal with independence, methodological integrity, and the role of politics, and I think the committee should study it carefully.
You might consider—and I'm not suggesting this is “the” answer, but it's “an” answer—amending the Statistics Act to make clear that the Chief Statistician, who is a statutory officer named in the Statistics Act and appointed by Governor in Council, has the sole responsibility for methodological and technical issues. I think Minister Clement was correct when he told this committee that this is a department of government that reports to the minister and that many questions around the choice of questions are political. But there is no doubt in my mind that the Chief Statistician should be the only person to comment on methodological questions in government and have the obligation to inform the chair of a parliamentary committee, or someone in public, of his views on methodological questions. I would urge the committee not to play partisan games with an important institution of governance.
Thank you.