I'm Simon Zhong, and I come from the Toronto Community and Culture Centre. I am the executive director of this organization.
Our organization's formal name is the Toronto Mainland Chinese Community Centre. It was founded in 1995 and registered as a charitable organization in 1998. Since 1996, the Toronto Community and Culture Centre has delivered settlement services, social programs, and youth internship programs, which are invariably supported by three levels of government.
The Toronto Community and Culture Centre provides settlement information to walk-in clients, as well as individual services through telephone inquiries and in groups. Since its inception, TCCC has successfully delivered a large number of programs to help immigrants settle in Toronto, which they call their new home, and provides opportunities to newcomers, particularly Mandarin-speaking immigrants, so that they may participate and integrate with mainstream society and volunteer at community events as well. The Toronto Community and Culture Centre targets 250,000 Mandarin-speaking community members in the GTA.
On August 13, 2010, we organized 38 organizations in the Chinese community on behalf of 100,000 community members, who fully support the federal government's change of the previously mandatory long-form census to now voluntary.
In 2006, the filling in of the long-form census became mandatory and was passed as law. Citizens could receive a penalty or be sent to jail if they refused to fill in the mandatory long-form census. It was a violation of the Canadian Privacy Act. The sentence was unnecessary.
The federal statistics department can find statistics based on various other data, such as municipal immigration data, NAPO data, and—