The information we get with question 33 helps us to explain why women are at an economic disadvantage. They make choices, and whether you want to call it unpaid work or selfless work, or whatever it is, if I wasn't buying groceries for my child, somebody would have to buy the groceries. If I'm not doing it, I have to pay someone to do it.
We can get caught up in semantics for years and have fun little conversations, but at the end of the day, child care is child care, elder care is elder care, and if I don't look after my 84-year-old mother, I have to pay someone to look after her.
I just want to make a point here. I hear the passion and I hear the real commitment and the interest from the members of the committee, but I don't hear a lot of discussion about what I think is the fundamental issue as to why people are outraged--and I think outraged is the word--about the cancellation of the mandatory long-form census. It's really simple. There are lots of data and there is lots of research. It is not all driven by our organization or special interest groups. There are examples from other countries, like our neighbour to the south. These data show that voluntary surveys, by virtue of being voluntary, underrepresent vulnerable groups. Full stop.
It's very simple. Up to now, Stats Canada has used the mandatory long-form census to correct for that skewing. It's a very simple proposition. If you don't have a mandatory long-form census, you don't have the ability to correct for that.
The stats are there. When they did it in the U.S., 43% of white households responded, compared with 20% of black households and 23% of Hispanic households. When you phoned them afterwards, as soon as you said it was voluntary, responses dropped off by 17%.
This is not driven by special interests. This is fact. You can play it any way you want, but that is the fundamental problem. We will not have factual, accurate data about the Canadian population. It will be the people who need the most help that will not be counted.
The longer we go on not having a mandatory long-form census, the more difficult it will become to correct for the bias and the bigger the skewing will get. It's simple.
Can we collect the information some other way? Sure, we can. We can become like Finland. We can have an identity card that combines our health records, school records, income records, employment records, traffic violations, credit checks, and crime records. Everything could be in one place.
Do you want to talk about being intrusive? Do you want to talk about aligning local, provincial, and federal governments? Do you want to talk about costs? Let's start doing that. That is the alternative, unless you want to accept that we're not going to know the makeup of our population.
I'm here on behalf of the Canadian Women's Foundation and the one in seven women in Canada who lives in poverty. But really the issue is far greater than the people in the groups that the five of us are speaking about.