Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this issue. I will be sharing my time with the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River.
This issue should not even be in front of us here in Parliament as we are consumed with so many other issues relating to the economy, health, the environment and global warming. We have a situation where we are dealing with an issue that is based on science in terms of data accumulation, but that has met an ideological front, being the Conservative Party of Canada and a minister who want to dismantle it. I honestly believe this is a short part of a longer game to eliminate discourse in this country and to make further cuts to individuals, organizations and groups that sometimes are on the fringe of society and need support. This serves the government's ideological agenda quite significantly, otherwise there would no reason to discuss it.
The first thing I want to touch on is the ludicrous arguments by the minister. It was interesting to watch him again in the House of Commons this morning. It is almost embarrassing. It is embarrassing because he gets up and talks about how the opposition wants to put people in jail and that government agents go to people's doors and infringe on their privacy. He uses language that is not becoming, I believe, of minister and is not defensible when we look at the actual facts.
The first fact is that the government's policy is to keep a policy it has had for four years, which is that if people do not finish their census or they do not fill out the form there is jail time. There is no way it can get around that. It has had this policy in place for four years, and had knowledge of it, and now throws it back on opposition members. When we looked at this policy, we said that it did not make any sense, that it did not seem fair, that we did not care to have it and that we did not want it either. We know that it was not even being used. We have not dragged people out of their homes, arrested them and put them behind bars, but that is the minister's policy.
For four years, the current government has known about that. It has had to plan the census. It has had to plan what it would do with it and how it would roll it out, and the government has maintained that. It is nothing more than a cheap game at the end of the day to try to fear monger.
The government tried earlier in the campaign to end the mandatory census when it talked about personal privacy. All of a sudden, there was a huge privacy concern that the minister raised originally. I picked up the phone and called the Privacy Commission to ask if it had concerns about the census. I found out that very few Canadians, in over 10 years, or something like that, had actually even called in to register a complaint, and then it worked on those complaints.
What I also learned in that conversation was that the census had already gone through a Treasury Board audit for privacy, which is required. So, the census that has been compiled, that has been written and that we have already spent money on it to make it ready to go, has gone through an internal privacy audit here in the House of Commons.
It also went through a privacy audit through the Privacy Commissioner. The Privacy Commissioner had already vetted the questions that would be on the census. In fact, the Privacy Commission described the relationship with Statistics Canada as being excellent and, in fact, ongoing. They worked together hand-in-hand to ensure they would get good quality data, that Canadians would be protected in terms of their privacy and that that they would eliminate these issues even before they came to the forefront.
The minister had to drop that argument but picked up the mantle of “we're going to put people in jail”.
During question period, which I have been listening to since the discussions began, for the minister to continue to talk about throwing people in jail and how it is wrong, is embarrassing because we know that is not happening. We know that is his policy that he never changed and we know Canadians are not buying that hyperbole.
What Canadians want to know is why the government wants to spend more money, advertise more and print more to do a census that would be voluntary, that would achieve limited results, that would throw away all the comparable data that we did in the past because we would not be able to compare them, and that has met universal opposition from business organizations to small community groups, even the remotest communities and aboriginal communities? They all recognize that the census in its current state is a much better option than what the minister and the Conservative Party are proposing.
The House of Commons is supposed to be a place where we can work together. What we learned from the minister's testimony this summer when we were called back to the committee was that on June 17 an order in council was made to make the mandatory census into a national household survey, similar to a bad experiment that was done in the United States but in reverse.
When I was at the Canada-U.S. Parliamentary Association meeting in Louisville this summer, Congress members, senators and census people from all across the United States were watching what Canada was doing and asking why we were doing it. They said that they had already gone there and that they had to reverse themselves because it had caused them all kinds of problems. They were mystified as to what was taking place in Canada.
At committee on June 17 we learned that, while the minister was in the House of Commons, he was already scheming to change the census without telling anybody else. The industry committee has a history of working fairly well together with members and try to be non-partisan. Normally, we would study an issue, call in some experts, examine the issue and then table some recommendations back to the House. The minister harboured that.
On June 26 the Canada Gazette issued the change but it was not until July 1 or 5 that the minister made his first public comments on the issue. As a result of those comments, on July 21, Munir Sheikh, the chief statistician of Canada, resigned because of what the minister said in public. It was a pretty dramatic departure.
In that context, the supposedly fiscal Conservatives, who claim to be good with people's money, ended up spending more. The industry committee had to be recalled, which resulted in more money and more time being spent, not to mention more waste. We could have met during the last session of Parliament and it would have been a more co-operative environment. The Conservatives refused to give agreement to scheduling, so one meeting was a complete waste of time and it cost thousands of dollars.
We are supposed to be protecting the pocketbooks of Canadians right now but because of the Conservatives' ideology and headstrong position, they ended up costing Canadians more money. I will repeat that again. To do the census the way the Conservatives want to do it will cost Canadians at least $30 million more. On top of that, businesses, researchers, churches and other types of religious organizations, indigenous populations, scientists, a whole series of groups and organizations that are the customers that buy the census data to the tune of millions of dollars, are telling us that this will ruin the census.
The response rate to the census is around 95%. The census acts as a scientific backstop to other types of surveys and data.
I have a letter written by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada to the minister. This group was consulted about the census in general. It says in the letter, “At no time was there any indication that the long form might be eliminated”. This group is opposed to this and has offered other suggestions to help out. However, the minister has refused.
Canadians have a choice in this: pay more money for the Conservative agenda or save more money and have less hassle by keeping the census the way it is, protect the scientific data that is necessary for a civilized society and ensure we will be able to use all the past investments Canadians have actually put into by completing past censuses. That is what we need to do.