Madam Speaker, if my colleague had read the Globe and Mail this morning, he would have seen a resounding headline that said, “The elimination of the long-form census defies reason”.
The census is a senseless debate. We are wasting precious House time when we should be focusing on the economic mismanagement of the Conservative government. We should be focused on the waste of spending, including $9 billion on prisons and the sole-source contract on $16 billion in fighter jets, $20 billion in corporate giveaways or $1.3 billion on a G8/G20 summit, much of it spent on glow sticks.
We should be focused on Canadian families and the rising cost of post-secondary education, keeping public health care strong and sustainable and caring for the sick and aged and our veterans, or properly funding retirement pensions or funding higher quality full-time jobs, not prisons, not fighter jets and not this senseless debate on this voluntary census survey—