I've thought a lot about the provisions. There are a number of things that have to happen. One is that a definition of the census needs to be inserted into the act that will ensure and make clear that even questions asked on a sample basis are part of the census. That's not there right now, and the courts have used that absence to say that this isn't part of the census; it must be a separate survey. If you clarify that particular point and stipulate in law that the census must be mandatory, you've solved part of your problem. Now this whole census has to be mandatory. No part of it can be made voluntary.
The next issue you have to deal with is whether it's going to be a comprehensive census. You need to set some kind of reference point. In a bill that was developed in the previous Parliament by Ted Hsu, the idea was to say that the content should be commensurate in scope to the.... I don't remember what the reference was. I think it was the 1981 census. That would mean that you would have a census that contained a large number of variables. The government could not decide to truncate it to only 10 questions, just do a basic head count. That would solve your second problem.
There's a third problem, because there has been a history of political intervention on census content, and there is a precedent in Australia for the chief statistician's having the authority to fix the census content after extensive consultation. That's an alternative. I am of two minds about that. When you're going to ask questions of the entire population and force people to respond, you might want parliamentary oversight, but you need to think about that.
The fourth piece is to be careful in the wording not to prevent Statistics Canada from using the most efficient mechanisms to get the data, which may not be the classic survey.