Madam Speaker, I am really surprised at the umbrage and the hyperbole expressed by both of the Liberal members who have spoken, members for whom I have a great deal of respect.
The member for St. Paul's just mentioned data about Inuit housing. It is as if all of this priceless data will be lost. I am sure with the expanded voluntary census that will be going out that such important data will be put forward by the communities that value that information getting into the system.
The issue here is not about eliminating the long form census. It is about eliminating those penalties, including fines and imprisonment. The Liberals are now asking for some of these penalties to be changed. Is that not interesting?
The member spoke about the priceless data. There have never been penalties for false information in the database, and this priceless data that so many scholarly people refer to may not be as accurate as they like to think. For example, I understand some 26,000 Canadians listed their religion as Jedi Knight.
So I wonder about the member's umbrage and hyperbole on this issue that we seem to be getting closer to consensus on fixing.