First of all, I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to come here today and share my thoughts with you on Bill C-36. It's good to be back at this committee after almost seven years, when I appeared following my resignation as chief statistician.
I think it would be useful for me to set a context for my comments on Bill C-36 and proposing changes to the Statistics Act. An official statistical agency must have the utmost trust of the users of this data. To achieve this objective, both the government and the official statistical agency should play their parts.
For its part, the agency must strive to achieve excellence in the production and dissemination of needed data. I can say, based on my experience, that the agency has always tried to do that. On the part of the government, it needs to find the appropriate mechanisms to make the official statistical agency accountable to the citizens of the country, while at the same time ensuring that the agency is appropriately independent and avoids political interference, both in fact and in appearance.
Avoiding political interference is important because Statistics Canada is in the business of producing facts, not in the business of policy-making, where political decisions are normal. Political interference can damage the trust that citizens must have in the official agency that is producing the data, which could make all official data suspect for users.
Turning to Bill C-36, I would like first of all to commend the government for setting the objective of increasing the independence of Statistics Canada and for introducing legislation to that effect. Let me now offer some comments. In doing so, I apologize to the committee, in that I have actually more questions than I have answers.
The existing Statistics Act is flawed, in that it gives the authority to make technical statistical decisions to the minister responsible for Statistics Canada. Bill C-36 rightly shifts some of that responsibility to the chief statistician. I'm pleased that the government has proposed this important change in proposed subsection 4(5).
However, the bill does not stop there. It allows the minister to send a public directive to the chief statistician in cases where the minister disagrees with the chief statistician on these matters. This is in proposed subsections 4.1(1) and 4.2(1). I understand fully that this is done to preserve accountability; however, it does raise a number of questions. Let me mention just two.
If a chief statistician is perceived not to have made appropriate decisions on statistical matters, so that the minister needs to intervene, how can the government afford to have such a chief statistician stay in the job for five years? Next, as an example, given that Statistics Canada is a national statistical agency and not a federal agency, as I understand it, what happens if a minister orders the cancellation of a survey that is of critical importance, say, to a province?
As I just mentioned, another proposed change in the bill is a fixed five-year term for the chief statistician. Presumably, the purpose of the five-year fixed term is that the chief statistician should be able to withstand political pressure.
However, let me mention that I am not aware of any such problem ever happening in the long life of Statistics Canada, but it may happen in the future, of course. I am, however, aware that the Prime Minister makes changes to the ranks of the senior civil service to match the best people to the types of deputy minister jobs that exist. This prime ministerial prerogative includes the chief statistician at this time. This raises the question whether it is worth sacrificing a known benefit that is part of a Prime Minister's authority at the moment to achieve a potential benefit with an uncertain and very small likelihood.
Another important proposed change is the establishment of the statistics advisory council. Its members would be appointed through an order in council and could be asked to provide advice to both the minister and the chief statistician on issues related to the "overall quality of the national statistical system". This also raises some questions. Why does the minister need advice from outside when they have the chief statistician for all such advice? What happens if the minister and the chief statistician have different views on the advice they get, particularly in the context of the chief statistician's five-year term? Is there a risk that a government would make politically motivated appointments to the council? Let me emphasize that, if a council is indeed established, it is of the utmost importance that it should be set on the right foot at the start of its life.
Let me now turn to the question of how things could have unfolded if this law had been in place in 2010 at the time of the cancellation of the long-form census. There were two issues running at that time, if I could remind the committee members. First, the inappropriateness of cancelling the census, which seriously reduced data quality, as I warned in my resignation statement. The second issue was the nature of the statements made by the minister in response to the criticism the government rightly received for making a very bad decision. These statements led to the resignation of the chief statistician.
On the first issue, regarding the cancellation of the long-form census, I have not found anything in Bill C-36 to suggest that things would have been different in 2010. The census would still be cancelled. Let me emphasize here that I am assuming that section 21 of the Statistics Act overrides section 22. If it does not, and my assumption is incorrect, I think the law should be clarified on that.
This raises another question. Given what we went through in 2010, and perhaps one of the reasons we are all gathered here today, is there not a need to avoid repeating that problem? On the issue of the nature of the minister's statements that led to the resignation of the chief statistician, I fully understand it is not possible to legislate that a minister cannot say those types of things.
Thank you.