Mr. Speaker, I rise today for results of the question that I asked on September 22 of the Minister of Industry. It had to do with the summer announcement that the Conservative government made that it would scrap the mandatory long form census. Its claim was that it was too intrusive into people's lives, that it wanted to free the citizens of having to answer those questions.
The three opposition parties, Statistics Canada, more than 350 associations and the majority of Canadians all opposed this move. They did not want the changes. They realized what was involved with good statistics. Even Munir Sheikh, who was the Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada, resigned in protest over the changes.
This is pretty serious stuff. It does not just happen. People just do not quit a job that they have done all their life and walk away for the heck of it. This was very serious. He realized what was going on.
The Liberal Party introduced an opposition day motion asking that the proposed changes be reversed. We had all three opposition parties in favour of reversing the changes. But the Conservative government decided that, no, it was not going to do anything; it was going to stick with it.
Many of the areas that we look at when we have the long form census are essential for people to make decisions.
The argument that the Conservatives came up with makes little sense. They are saying that it is intrusive, that people do not want to answer those questions. It really does not make any sense. Then they came up with the idea that people do not deserve to be thrown in jail for not answering this.
The minister was asked many times how often that had taken place. Never. Not once since the census was put in place has anyone been put in jail. The threat was there. One time in committee I myself asked the minister to just take off that penalty and we would still get the information we need and go on that way.
The minister would not change it. Instead, he left it and just got rid of the mandatory requirement completely.
What ended up happening was that the Conservatives decided to make it so that people could answer it if they wanted to. However, in order to do that, they thought they would put forward a campaign.
Do members know how much that campaign cost? It cost $30 million. There was $30 million spent on propaganda telling people that they should fill out something that they would have normally filled out anyway and not paid much attention to. The argument that they make often is that thousands of people argued and thousands of people called and said they were not going to fill this in. It turns that there were not that many at all.
When I asked my question, I did not get an answer. I got some bantering back and forth.
Basically, why is this being done? Is it creating a crisis so that people will be afraid to go to jail? It is getting people excited for nothing.
It is really getting people on a bandwagon so that the Conservatives can create a crisis and then come across as the white knight who solves a problem that never existed.