Mr. Speaker, I do not know, in all the time I have been here, that I have ever heard so much rubbish and fear-mongering as I have today. I have to say that.
The hon. member opposite made a statement. Maybe it was changed in translation, but it came across as, “if it is not overturned, all the data will be lost”. That is one of the ridiculous statements and positions we have heard all day.
When we were at committee, we actually had one professional pollster who came to committee. He was asked if it was possible to gather this data and have good data from a voluntary survey. He said that of course it was. He did this for a living and said that of course it was possible. So everything we have heard today is actually fear-mongering.
The one reality that does exist is that people have been intimidated by this process in the past. I want to give one example from my riding, because the people called me. I have had dozens of people call me, but this one stood out, because it was a farmer who was being called about the farm survey. He was getting cancer treatments. He told the Statistics Canada person on the phone that he was getting treatments and needed to be left alone. Rather than do that, they started calling from 7 o'clock in the morning until 11 o'clock at night. He could not convince them to leave him alone until we finally intervened and asked Statistics Canada to stop calling. That is the kind of thing that has happened.
I know other people who have been threatened with fines and jail time if they do not fill out the long form census. I have had many calls in my riding. This has been one of the sources of contention in my riding for a number of years. People in my riding are telling me that they are very thankful.
It is interesting that the other side is more than willing to represent special interest groups, but those groups are often at odds with the real people who are sick and tired of being told what they have to do. It really reveals a difference between this side of the House and the coalition. The main difference is whether we seriously think we should be invading people's privacy or not. On this side we do not think so.
The questions they want to force people to answer include how many bedrooms they have in their houses or what time they leave for work in the morning. Those are the kinds of things they are willing to go to the wall for. We think it is reasonable to let people answer these questions voluntarily. We know that Canadians will do that. They will stand up. They love and respect their country. They will take care of these issues.