Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll be supporting the motion. I appreciate that another parliamentary group is looking at this, but as Industry Canada is responsible for this file, I think it's very pertinent.
I'll go back to when I first got here and Stats Canada was an independent association that really had the respect of all the world. What happened from that point in time is that the then government decided to outsource gathering data in its collection to Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became part of an outsourcing public-private partnership attempt to—so-called—save money. They laid off successive workers, and that was just prior to the complete count, Mr. Chair.
For those who are not familiar with the complete count, it was done in the year 2000 because Stats Canada has a research system that allows for study and it connects to how studies are then related to the public in surveys. Then they determine the allocation of resources related to everything from housing to aboriginal issues related to supports and other matters. These are critical elements.
We did the complete count. In my riding we had one of the few door-to-door counts, which I was a part of as a city councillor in the year 2000. It was assigned specifically to increase the turnout, because the turnout in my riding was at such a low point, despite being one of the poorest ridings in an urban setting, and it required that type of challenge for door-to-door counts because of languages, skill sets, and populations that were moving—all those things. That all relates to strategic decisions related to industry, investment, and so forth.
At any rate, we fought that battle with Lockheed Martin, which is interesting because of the U.S. Patriot Act. Lockheed Martin at that time wanted to have its data assembled in Minnesota. That was happening when the Patriot Act was passed. The way it works with the Patriot Act is that they can get the data from a company—any information they want—but the company cannot report that back to the contracting party, to where they're getting the data from. Basically, Canadians' data and information was exposed to the U.S. government. We were successful in stopping the Patriot Act in regard to having Canadians' information from being outsourced. It was actually redone, and the cost to the government of the day was another $6 million.
Now we fast forward to the reason why this is extremely relevant to this motion and why the committee should look at it. That then led to the next problem, which was that we had the long-form census killed by the Conservative government. There's more. I don't want to take up too much time here, but I think it's important that we have some of this in the context of what we're going to decide next. The long-form census was killed despite being one of the most important data summaries that a nation has. It was still done quite well despite the previous problems that I've referred to. Once again, the long-form census is very important. It backstops data for surveys, for agricultural surveys and so forth.
Then it became this whole thing.... Remember that thing about people going to jail for not filling out their census forms? It was Tony Clement who at that time was arguing that people could go to jail, that they were being harassed and all those different things, so we were going to go to a short-form census. That turned out to be a complete debacle as well, because there was no substance to that thing about people being rounded up and put in jail for not doing the census.
At that time, the Liberals—I believe it was member Ted Hsu—had a bill on the census in the House of Commons, and I had a bill on the census too. The crux of where the difference between the Liberal position and our position was—I don't know where the Conservatives stand on this—is that my bill, which I still have, qualifies that the previous chief statistician, Mr. Wayne Smith, has independence. That, at the end of day, is what made him decide to walk away from his position: his independence was not provided and was undermined by the structure of the legislation.
Not only did we not fix anything, we enshrined this, not only with government but also with other government bureaucrats, as indicated through commentary in the media. The independence was undermined by data gathering that is supposed to be raw and crunched in a way such that it's used and applied for all sciences and also for other types of research. Also, which is really, really important, it's how funding is allocated by the federal government in terms of a variety of reasons.
For those reasons alone—I know there are many others, but I will do my colleagues a favour by not bringing up the others—I think there is a role for us to actually look at this. It's more appropriate, because we deal with a lot of grants, government programs, and services that use Stats Canada and the industry department as well for their research and development in projecting investment on a regular basis. How we got to our current situation and where we go in the future needs to be looked at with this committee being involved, because this committee, at the end of the day, is responsible.
I don't like somebody coming over—another committee—without us having some type of a connection.... I think it can be helpful, and in fact I've often felt that a number of committees can co-work. It has been done in the past. But in this case, we can't stand down just because somebody else is doing some work. We need to enhance that work and play our role. We should not stand down for somebody else who is using our file or doing work on our file. We're thankful for it because, for this serious problem, the more light shed, the better, but we do not want to abdicate our responsibility, which I think we do by not dealing with the matter.