Industry Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2016

[Anil Arora]

I'm not sure I understand the question. The Government of Canada has very clear rules on access to information and what can or cannot be redacted. For anything that is not made available, there should be a good rationale.

Obviously my going-in position is that unless we're going to be contravening a particular act or violating somebody's privacy in a way that is currently specified in the legislation, I want to make sure that I'm helpful and I'm providing information that makes sense to Canadians. That's what the intent of that legislation is.

If I were offside of that legislation, I'd want to make sure that I corrected it, but with the intent that always we want to be helpful. That's what we do day in and day out: disseminate usable information that people can consume to make decisions. I would want to make sure that I retain that approach.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

We're going to move to Mr. Baylis. You have five minutes.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. Chair, I'll be sharing my time with Mr. Jowhari.

I have another question about the information in the census.

The information is used by MPs and the government to develop new programs to solve existing problems. One of the problems encountered in rural regions of our country is the significant lack of high-speed Internet access.

Can this element be included in a census? Even though people talk to us about it, we don't really have clear information on the subject, and we don't know what the needs are in this area. Is it something you could consider?

[Anil Arora]

I'm not sure that the census is the best tool to meet this need.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Do you have any other tools in mind?

[Anil Arora]

We conducted a study a few years ago, the Internet Use Survey. If I'm not mistaken, 83% of the people had Internet access, and 97% of those people had high-speed Internet access.

Yes, we have tools to measure the gaps. The numbers I referred to didn't include rural regions.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I have read statistics indicating that a fairly high number of people have Internet access. However, in reality, we've heard that this isn't the case in the regions. Many witnesses have told us that the government must get involved in the matter.

First, can we have access to the survey? Second, can you start thinking of other ways to conduct the study again?

[Anil Arora]

Yes, but we need to work with our colleagues from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, since that type of study is expensive. When we have needs that are a bit more specific, we need a fairly large sample size, which is costly.

As I said earlier, we also need to find other methods. We could use administrative data, for example, to give us a better idea. However, there are other methods to consider.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Arora.

I'll now give the floor to Mr. Jowhari.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Arora, I'd like to personally thank you for highlighting mental health as an area that we are seriously lacking data on.

I would like to ask the following question: how can we, as a committee or as members of Parliament, work with you in any capacity to facilitate the collection and analysis of that data that we greatly need, especially in the areas of mental health and its impact on the workforce and on the GDP?

Thank you.

[Anil Arora]

First, thank you. It is an issue dear to me, and obviously it is an important issue for our country today.

Many people suffer. We don't understand the characteristics of it, how to even measure or define it fully, or what the trends are. Anecdotally, I think we see that it's having an impact, obviously, in so many ways. There are social as well as economic impacts.

As I said earlier, there are a number of surveys on the health side through administrative records, because a lot of our health survey data come through administrative records from provinces and territories. I think one way we could use help is in ensuring.... Maybe it's a more general request. A lot of the data come from other jurisdictions. Sometimes there are concerns over the timeliness and the definitions. We have different methods by which those data are collected. Statistics Canada tries to play a leadership role in ensuring, even in those jurisdictional kinds of issues, that there are common definitions. Having access to that information in a timely way for Statistics Canada sometimes can be a challenge, so I think that can help very much.

The second thing is that whenever you're trying to get at subpopulations and trying to study very precise phenomena, even the set of questions up front to try to get at the target population can take a bit of time and be burdensome. Once again, I think that encouraging people through the media and other intermediaries to participate in those surveys can also be very helpful.

Those are two concrete ways.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to go to Mr. Masse. You have the last two minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Do you have the completed short form survey rate, the rate for all that have been completed?

[Anil Arora]

I would have to get that for you.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay, if you could do that, I would like that. I would also like the completed long form survey rate. Third, I'd like the completed usable rate per question, the data that you could actually use per question.

I'd be interested in those rates. I think the committee would too, because the response rate methodology that's being proposed is a public relations issue that I think is quite unfortunate, for a number of different reasons. At any rate, I would like those, if possible. It gives a more scientific approach to it.

Second, do you have any disagreements with the privatization of the census, and do you support keeping a publicly operated census?

[Anil Arora]

On the first one, I'll certainly get you the response rates on the short form and the long form, and the basis of that calculation—

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

And the rate response in each individual question....

[Anil Arora]

The individual question is a subject of the next year, essentially, meaning by the end of 2017. As the releases come out, we'll get a better sense, because there is edit and imputation, and there is all sorts of work that needs to be done to actually arrive at some of those. That will be part and parcel of the data releases when we put out the metadata and some of the quality concerns around it. I think that will come, but it will be later, as those other subject matter releases are made.

To your question about privatization of the census, that's a very interesting question. To my knowledge, no other country has even entertained the thought of a third party, other than the government, collecting such sensitive information from its citizens, either through administrative records or through a questionnaire.

I would have to say that as we've just discussed, the quality of information you require requires a mandatory instrument to collect it. How do you even get a third party to impose a mandatory compliance on a population?

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

The Paul Martin government did actually outsource the census to Lockheed Martin.

[Anil Arora]

I was actually a census manager back in 2006, when we contracted out the provision of hardware and software to the private sector in a very open, transparent competitive process, and I can assure you that the census was done by Statistics Canada employees and that nobody other than Statistics Canada employees ever came in contact with the responses.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

That's because of a campaign to keep that information in Canada, because part of the contract included information gathering in the United States, which was then subject to the Patriot Act.

Also, further money on the contract amendment took place because of that weakness in the original RFP out there.

[Anil Arora]

The contracts were, first, divided into two phases, and in fact the first phase was a test phase.

In the second phase, there was always the intent to exercise the kind of changes that we needed, for various reasons, and it was very clear in that phase that no contractor would ever come in contact with confidential response data.

As you recall, at that point, we had Denis Desautels, the former Auditor General of Canada, put out a public report and a statement, which confirmed that all the systems in fact had all the provisions to ensure the confidentiality—

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

That's because the contract had to be amended and the data had to remain in Canada, because the previous contract originally allowed it to go to Minnesota, I believe, or outside of Canada, for data accumulation. It was a private American firm that actually had the Lockheed Martin contract for data assimilation.

[Anil Arora]

The data centres had to be in Canada, and they were owned, operated, and run by government employees. The data was never going to leave Canada, and it was never going to be at any other facility than Statistics Canada's facility, which is exactly what the original—