Madam Chair, we are aware that every justification just given by the minister has already been debunked by organizations and experts, including the former chief statistician who resigned because he believed he had been misrepresented by the minister.
This costly, damaging change to the census will undermine important information required to provide services. The minister claims to be speaking for Canadians in making these changes. However, we also know that zero privacy complaints were received by Statistics Canada for its 2006 census and only three complaints were received by the privacy commission in the past decade, none of which were upheld. Therefore, there has not been consultation. There has been no record of complaints.
The minister mentioned that this was a principled decision. Is this a decision based on the Prime Minister's principle as expressed in his comment, “I make the rules”?