Madam Speaker, I am very pleased today to speak to Bill C-568, An Act to amend the Statistics Act (mandatory long-form census).
I will read the summary of the bill so that the viewing public can understand it:
This enactment amends the Statistics Act to provide that the census of population taken under section 19 of the Act must be taken using a long-form census questionnaire that conforms substantially, in length and substantive scope, to the census starting in 1971 and at intervals thereafter to meet the requirements of that section. This enactment also removes the punishment of imprisonment for a person convicted of the offence of providing false or misleading information.
I congratulate the member, who is a long-standing member of the House, for introducing this bill.
When the government announced its initiative many months ago, I got the impression that most people, even Conservatives that I talked to among members of the public, felt it was the most boneheaded move the government had made since the killing of the prison farms.
Generally speaking, the public settles down based on ideology and their voting patterns. When the government of their choice introduces something, they try to understand what the government is doing. By and large, they find a way to accept, if they are Conservatives, what their government is doing and work out a rationale for it.
However, these are two issues, which I find from talking to Conservatives, that just leave them puzzled. They cannot explain why the government has done it and they do not agree that the prison farms should have been eliminated. They certainly do not agree that the census should be changed.
That aside, many organizations have the same view on this matter. There are business organizations across the country that require the statistics provided by the census in order to conduct proper business operations.
As the Liberal member mentioned previously, in his attempt to find out why the government was doing this, he looked at the cost of it and said that the government is spending $30 million more to get less reliable data. It does not make sense.
Then I looked back to a question that I asked on September 28. We were looking at best practices. I like to talk about best practices. That is the hallmark of Conservatives. Whatever line of business we are talking about, computers, IT issues, it is always best practices and they are lined up with Conservatives.
Well, the best practices here would seem to be the United States. The Conservatives seem to want to follow where the United States is going, and they are always six months or six years behind. I do not know whether the member has checked this out or not, but back in 2003 when George Bush was the president, the Americans tried this experiment. The U.S. Census Bureau conducted an experiment and found that the data was degraded so much that fixing it would be too expensive and it abandoned the idea.
What sort of planning is the government involved in and what sort of planning did it do to develop this approach?
We know what the approach was. It was a knee-jerk ideological approach to the problem. The Conservatives had a preconceived notion. Their Conservative ideology tells them that this census is an irritant to a certain number of their supporters, and they probably heard from a few of them over the years.
I am sure it is the libertarian part of the party that is flexing its muscles at this point. The libertarians have not had a lot of support from the government over the last four or five years as it races to recoup as much of the centre ground from the Liberals that it could get its hands on. Every once in a while the Conservatives throw some red meat at the libertarians in their group.
That is the only reason the Conservatives would have taken this measure. The public does not support what they are doing.
The Joe Clark government seemed to have suicidal tendencies from day one. That was the government that started sending pension cheques to federal prisoners. We have not seen that suicidal tendency in the Conservative Party over the years, but we are certainly seeing it now.
Practically every business organization in the country is opposed to the government's approach on the census. School boards are opposed to the idea. Pretty much each and every province is opposed to the idea. Members over there might be able to tell me that one province is onside with respect to this issue. My home province of Manitoba is not in favour of this approach to the census. If the government is trying to get allies, if it is trying to build support, then it does not make any sense to torch its relationships.
We support this bill because it seeks to reverse the ideologically-based decision of the Conservative government to cancel the long form census. It would remove imprisonment of a person convicted of providing false and misleading information. That is an issue. Nobody has ever spent time in jail for failing to provide information with respect to the census, but the idea that it was possible may have weighed heavily on some people when they were asked to provide information.
While we support the bill, it really does not go far enough. Bill C-583 put forward by our colleague from Windsor West goes one step further. It would enshrine in law the primacy of evidence-based decision making over political manoeuvring of the likes we have seen with the government. We have seen political manoeuvring by the government not only with respect to this issue but with respect to a whole range of other areas. The Conservatives have fired people, sometimes people that they hired, who do not see things their way. They hired the victims' advocate three years ago and when he did not act the way he promised on victims' support, they simply fired him. They will get somebody who sees things their way.
As I have indicated, no Canadian has been imprisoned for failing to fill out the long form census. That would be removed if this bill were to pass. We have to remove political interference in the process. The chief statistician has to be able to do his or her job in an environment free of political meddling by an ideological government, certainly one like the Conservative government which is intent on suppressing evidence and information that contradicts its own narrow agenda.
Imagine the outrage from Canadians and the international community if the finance minister had interfered with the independence of the Governor of the Bank of Canada to set monetary policy. Why should we accept the government's heavy-handedness by interfering with our chief statistician's capacity to do his or her job?
As I have indicated, hundreds of individuals, organizations, businesses, governments from coast to coast, certainly an apolitical group of people have raised alarm bells about the terrible decision to cancel the long form census--