Mr. Speaker, as correctly identified, Bill S-13 attempts to strike a balance between access to data and confidentiality. Well noted in the details was the concept of enlightened consent for 2006.
I was the chair of the complete count committee for Windsor and Essex County for the 2000 census. It was critical to get reliable data because as a country we make a lot of decisions about where we spend money and resources on census data. It was important that the data was very thorough, was very strong and was as good as it possibly could be. To do that, we had to build up public confidence. We had to go door to door, as one of six places in Ontario, to ensure that confidence, especially when we were dealing with multicultural communities where people who had come from abroad were being counted for the first time not only in numbers but also in very personal and sensitive information. Canadians in general are very concerned about privacy matters, whether they be in the government itself or outside in the private sector.
My concern is about the way the government has handled the next stage of Canada's census by outsourcing it to Lockheed Martin. I believe it would create a real crisis for Canadians to give information about themselves, their families and their lifestyles to a multinational arms manufacturing company that could quite literally have been responsible, if they had come from another country, for damaging their property, injuring them or killing a neighbour or a family friend with products that the company actually sells abroad to a number of different nations.
My concern is that we would witness a slow erosion of the confidence. To instill that confidence again, will we cancel that contract that is due in 2004 by Lockheed Martin and do it in house? It is not acceptable to say that we have no control over this because of NAFTA and the fact that it is an American multinational corporation that is an arms manufacturer and can bid just like anybody else. It does not have to do that because we can do it in house as we have done before.
Will the parliamentary secretary work with me to ensure that Canadians are doing this job and that it is in house so we can restore the confidence in our census data?