Okay, I have a couple of thoughts on that.
First of all, in regard to the short form, the government has certainly maintained the mandatory short-form census for all Canadians. I'm glad you made that point, because I think there's some misunderstanding. I've seen headlines about scrapping the census. There has been no scrapping of the census, and it's important that you made that point.
Of course, the government has made a decision that when we're talking about the balance of information and the role of government in collecting information, certainly collecting information about who lives where, which is on the short form, and collecting information about the age distribution of our population, which is on the short form, is important information to gather. In fact, I would argue that most of the examples cited in terms of other levels of government and organizations using census data for their decision-making actually refer to questions that are on the short form and are going to continue to be mandatory for all Canadians to answer.
I want to move, if I could, to Mr. Lam.
You talked a little bit about concerns about the accuracy of the long form. At a previous committee meeting, we had Darrell Bricker here before us, and one of the things he talked about was that when you force people to answer questions they don't want to answer, there are significant concerns about the accuracy of the information you're getting. Perhaps that's where we get, for example, on the religion question in 2001, 21,000 Canadians who said they were Jedi Knights of the Jedi Knight religion. So there may be questions in terms of the type of information they get.
Certainly in my conversations with the individuals who the Liberal Party doesn't want to talk to but certainly we want to talk to, they express the same thing. In fact, I've had several people say, “You know what? I filled it out because it was mandatory. I didn't want to fill it out, but I certainly didn't feel obligated to get into great detail in terms of the answers that I was giving.”
Maybe you could speak to that a little bit, sir, that concern that you brought up.