The question about usability.... As I mentioned in my opening comments, Statistics Canada said--and I absolutely implicitly trust them--that it will meet many user needs. There's no question about that. The trouble is we won't know which ones and to what extent, because bias is unknowable. They accept in some special circumstances.... Well, there is some independent data against which I won't verify, but that's rarely the case.
So that's the fundamental problem and that's what really causes my concern.
As much as it affects data on the status of anything, whatever it is--we mean aboriginals, immigrants, youth, the construction industry, whatever--it affects infinitely more changes. Because there is a new method proposed to be introduced in 2011, which is a voluntary survey with about half the expected response rate of the compulsory one, we will have even relatively minor biases hide the estimated changes. So the estimated changes of whatever--whether it's status of women, or aboriginals, or immigrants, or youth, whatever--will be really doubtful.
My last point is again--I made it in my opening comment--that doubt is pernicious, because it will shift the debate from the underlying issues to whether the data can be trusted for this purpose. That's what I'm really concerned about. The next five years will be spent debating the data as opposed to the underlying issues they are supposed to reveal.