Thank you very much for this opportunity to address these extremely important issues.
I would like to go directly to my main point, which is that the changes that are being made to the census are a failure on a massive scale and at a fundamental level of Canada's commitment to carry out gender-based analysis of every policy, practice, law, and program in the country.
In a written brief I will be providing the committee with the specific legal references to the international charter, constitutional human rights, and other obligations that form the human rights framework within which these violations are taking place, but I'd like to go to my second point, which is that these violations of human rights that flow from the failure to carry out a gender impact analysis of the changes being proposed to the census are all the more egregious because this is the second most disastrous economic period of crisis that Canada has faced in a century.
One of the things that made it very difficult and challenging to cope with the current situation was the dearth of usable social science information as to how the Great Depression affected various vulnerable groups in Canada. So if we change the census at this point to remove both the scope and the validity of data that is otherwise available to us, as a country we impair our ability to understand what is happening right now, to translate it for future generations, and to learn and grow from the experience.
The gender impact is severe and goes beyond the prospective damage that would flow from the current economic crisis. First of all, the right of Canadians to have access to the best statistical tools and policy analysis techniques just when they are most needed is a concrete human rights guarantee. And if the government fails to continue providing the best data possible, that itself is a violation of rights, because important sources of data that would otherwise have been available will be gone permanently and cannot be recovered, as other witnesses have already testified. But the core of the government's justification seems to be not the human rights justification, which is that women are already totally endurably equal; the government's justification is that this is all right, they can use the data for unpaid work from the general social survey.
I'd like to use the remaining minute of my time to make a couple of points as to the inadequacies of the general social survey unpaid work data.
First of all, question 33 on unpaid work in the 2006 census, which is being cancelled regardless of which form of national instrument goes forward, is the tool that was designed to find the gendered unpaid work in Canada. The general social survey does not do that. In the question period, I can give examples of such differences in the sampling methodologies and some of the other techniques used in the GSS that make it a far less useful instrument for evaluating who does unpaid work in Canada and what type of work that is.
There are huge omissions from the general social survey. For example, it does not even attempt to cover elder care issues, which are covered in the census, and there are a number of technical problems with it.
The last very quick point that I would like to make is that I and other witnesses here today can give personal testimony to the fact that Statistics Canada was not being very accurate when it took the position two days ago that when it looked around to see if anybody was using the data from question 33, it found that, “no one was using that data”. It took the position that there was “no academic work” using that data. I'm here to testify to the contrary.
Those are my submissions.