Mr. Speaker, yes, I used the word progenitor. It has to do with genealogy and genesis, I believe. It seems to me that somewhere in the back of my brain that word was kicking around, bouncing around off the walls, and so I just pulled it out and used it. I am going to look it up myself when I get back. I think it is a word, but he has shattered my absolute confidence and so we will be both checking it out in the dictionary later on today.
If we look at the history of the Statistics Act in Canada, my understanding is that the first act was passed by the House of Commons and the Senate and declared into law in 1918. It required that there be some promise of confidentiality. The panel that studied this at the time said, “We are persuaded that a guarantee of perpetual confidentiality was not intended to apply to the census”.
That was the conclusion and I am not sure that we should put a lot of weight in that, but it goes back a long way. If that was the impression at the time, then I think that we should not try to rewrite history now. That is my answer to that particular question.
I am also sorry that the hon. member did not ask me about the Senate because it is Bill S-18. As a matter of fact, I would like to strengthen the role of the Senate in this country. It could be a great unifying effort. If we were to have a truly elected Senate and one that was equally apportioned across the country, I think that people in the west and in Atlantic Canada would no longer feel so terribly excluded in this country as they are now with Quebec and Ontario each having 24 senators, all of them being appointed by the party of the day. Those things are offensive in a democratic world and we should work as hard as we can, and arrange things so that we can correct that, as our party has tried to do over the last 12 years.