My view is that collecting race-based data is always a positive thing. It's really critical that we begin, as a country, to better understand the real experience of an increasing diversity of Canadians.
In terms of the use of the data, however, that is where I would have a concern in that, if certain data is not reviewed from a critical race perspective by individuals who are informed about the nature of systemic racism, sometimes the data can actually support what I will call “racist claims”. If we take a look at data and we see that in a particular area Black people are committing more crime than white people, if we don't understand that Black people in that area are dramatically overrepresented among the poor, among those who don't experience positive engagement in education, among those who are systemically excluded from employment, for example, then the data isn't really going to help us.
What's really critical as we begin collecting this data is that we have specialized individuals within Statistics Canada who can apply critical race analysis to the data, so that we are not allowing the data to reinforce racist stereotypes.