Statistics Canada has been collecting the time use surveys, the time use studies, and has received high praise for doing that really well. It has been doing it for decades. Certainly since the 1995 Beijing platform for action, it has been accelerating on this. It's only every five years. The United States collects time use data every year. There is a question of whether or not we could collect it more often, but it is done with the census.
As I said in my remarks, I think we could do more. I think time use data tells us a lot about the activities and tasks that people do. There are ways to do it better especially if people are keeping time diaries during the day, rather than doing them retrospectively even within a day. I also believe that we should combine those with qualitative research, where we're interviewing people and shadowing people, spending time with them to see how they actually spend their days.
I think that's especially important with diverse populations. I think in indigenous populations there may be different conceptions of time. There's a lot that we could still tap into and do a better job of looking at how people live their everyday lives, but you can only get so much of that through numbers and through statistics. I think some of it is through stories and narratives, through talking to people and listening to people, and then telling those provocative, compelling stories, so that people understand and can create social change from those stories.