Mr. Speaker, just this past summer we celebrated the 50th anniversary of former Prime Minister Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights established a lot of things in law that Canadians, prior to that, had felt but never actually had in a written document. Among those rights were rights to privacy, liberty, freedom and rights of the person, for example.
Sometime after that, about 11 years later, another prime minister, Prime Minister Trudeau, came along and implemented the long form census, if my history is correct.
For the Liberal Party members, they do not actually believe Canadians are capable of making any decisions on their own so they feel they need to know everything about them so they can make all decisions for Canadians on their behalf.
I do not know if the member has taken statistics courses but I have taken a lot of statistics courses in my lifetime and this is the first time in any debate I have ever heard that voluntary data is somehow less valuable than mandatory data. I had never heard that before this debate. We have a l lot of surveys done in Canada.
I have a question for the hon. member. Is it inconvenient to respect Canadians' right to privacy when the greatest civic duty in this country is to vote and we do not make that mandatory? Why does the hon. member see this as a civic duty that is more important? I actually think government should respect Canadians' right to privacy and individual liberty.