The statistics agencies of other countries have said it's an issue for them because they can't take money and carry out statistical work. In some cases it doesn't happen, in which case it's a loss to everybody. The society doesn't get the data. In other cases, the survey may be carried out by an academic or private sector survey firm, but the data is held by the department that paid for it and not made public. The department benefits but the rest of the public doesn't.
We require that any data we collect, any survey we do, has to be made fully public. Everything we do becomes available to everybody to use in the wake of our completing the work.
The reality in Canada is that, although it's not quite true in other countries, there are very few organizations, provinces, territories, universities, almost none, that are able to carry out large-scale surveys. Even the private sector firms increasingly don't have that capacity anymore. In Canada the alternatives to Statistics Canada are relatively few.
That's not true in the United States, where there's a very dynamic industry operating out of universities notably and some private sector firms. There's something similar in the U.K., but other countries, like Australia and New Zealand, are more like us.