Thank you for that question.
On basketball, I hopefully look forward to the opportunity in the near future to play with you and our other colleagues to raise money for charity.
With regard to the fund you're talking about, obviously it's not within the scope of the conversation, but I'll quickly speak to it. Then I'll get to the specific matters pertaining to Bill C-36. The $800 million in terms of the super clusters investment was actually a campaign commitment that we had made. It was not a reflection of who we appointed as innovation advisers. That was a campaign commitment that we honoured in our first budget, a while before we had identified innovation leaders across the country.
With regard to this bill, you're absolutely right, we're very sensitive to the fact that we want to end political interference. We learned some hard lessons in 2011, when a voluntary form was brought in which compromised the quality of data. Hundreds of communities did not receive data because the sample size wasn't sufficient. Particularly in our rural or remote communities, which need this information for planning purposes—to build schools, for social services—this really undermined our ability to proceed forward in a meaningful way to address those issues.
The quality of data has a significant and direct impact on Canadians. Based on those challenges, based on those issues, we took immediate action by reintroducing the mandatory long-form census. That's why, for our going forward now, what we want to accomplish is taking what's in convention right now in terms of Statistics Canada and enshrining it into law.
We have a very balanced approach to this.