moved:
That the House calls on the Government of Canada to reinstate immediately the long-form census; and given that no person has ever been imprisoned for not completing the census, the House further calls on the government to introduce legislative amendments to the Statistics Act to remove completely the provision of imprisonment from Section 31 of the Act in relation to the Long-form Census, the Census of Population and the Census of Agriculture.
Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to say that I will be sharing my time this morning with my colleague, the hon. member for St. Paul's. Furthermore, I would greatly appreciate it if you could warn me one minute before the end of my 10-minute speech.
I am very proud to rise today on this first Liberal opposition day to speak about something that is very important to Canada. I would like to read the English text of my party's motion:
That the House calls on the Government of Canada to reinstate immediately the long-form census; and given that no person has ever been imprisoned for not completing the census, the House further calls on the government to introduce legislative amendments to the Statistics Act to remove completely the provision of imprisonment from Section 31 of the Act in relation to the Long-form Census, the Census of Population and the Census of Agriculture.
What happened this summer? I can guarantee that when all of my colleagues in the House today left Parliament in June, they never would have thought that come September, we would be here debating the census.
What happened this summer on this issue? When I entered politics, I entered because I had a vision, like that of my party, for this country. I recognize that other parties have different visions, but I never for one second thought that today I would be arguing for the government to back away from what is a ridiculous decision on its part to change the long form census questionnaire.
During the quiet of the summer, when people were not looking and people were at their cottage, the current government, as it does sometimes with other issues, decided that it would announce a change to the long form census, that it would take this priceless and extremely important database, which is used to get an accurate portrait of the Canadian mosaic, and it is a complex mosaic, and that it would jeopardize its future value by turning it from a compulsory census to a voluntary census, not realizing, perhaps initially, or at least it said, that this would jeopardize the value of this census.
The census itself is a database that allows government policy to be formulated in the most intelligent manner for the benefit of Canadians. It requires accuracy and completeness because the Canadian mosaic is composed of rich and poor and of minorities, whether they be linguistic, ethnic or our first nations. Canada is a complex mosaic and in order to have an accurate portrait of the country, we need to know the level of education of Canadians; their habits with respect to commuting, because we are very interested in trying to promote public transportation in this era where we are concerned about the environment; and a host of important answers to questions that allow us to put in place informed policy.
Why did the current government not realize that by switching from a compulsory census to a voluntary census that it would be jeopardizing this priceless database?
It was clearly a bad decision and one that we and all Canadians reacted to very decisively. In fact, as members know, over 350 well-respected groups have said, “Stop this insanity. Do not do this. This is the wrong thing to do. This is an essential tool for public policy. It is an essential tool for non-governmental organizations that are concerned about social and economic issues. Why disturb something that has been working extremely well for the past 30 years, essentially in the same form?”.
I have been asked by many people why the government did this. I have had great difficulty in answering that question.
The only one that makes sense to me is that the Conservatives thought they would get some political gain by announcing this decision, that they might be able to consolidate their base or find some new adherents to their party. Of course, this throws out the window the importance of scientific rigour, logic and truth, and replaces them with ideology and dogma. It takes us into darkness. This was a bad decision.
Let me quote some of the people who have talked about it. The Canadian Association of University Teachers said, “We are deeply concerned about the disastrous consequences this will have for the scientific understanding of Canadian society, and for the ability to make informed decisions about social and economic policies”.
We will no longer be able to draw certain conclusions or know whether the gap between young and old or the gap between regions has grown. These kinds of analyses will not be possible.
The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council said, “You're not going to have the same level of reliability” with a voluntary survey.
This makes us even more vulnerable to a government or an interest group that claims something, because we will not have the data to contradict them.
Canada's professional planners depend on accurate, timely and consistent data to help build Canadian communities. Making the collection of this data voluntary undermines good public policy.
We know about the letter that was sent by two previous clerks of the Privy Council, Mr. Himelfarb and Mr. Cappe, as well as the letter sent by David Dodge, a highly respected former governor of the Bank of Canada. Ivan Fellegi, who was really the father of Statistics Canada, a widely respected organization, sent a letter to the Prime Minister asking him to please reconsider.
We have heard about evangelical groups and the Canadian Jewish Congress expressing very openly the fact that this was a wrong-headed decision.
We have heard the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, express recently that this may make it more difficult for the Government of Canada with respect to its fiscal policy.
The complaints that have been brought out in the past three months have been thunderous and overwhelming. Let me mention a few of them. Many of them are in ridings where members of the government actually reside. The cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Fredericton, Hamilton, Kelowna, Kitimat, Langley, Mississauga, North Vancouver, Merritt, Montreal, New Westminster, Ottawa, Penticton, Pitt Meadows, Prince George, Spruce Grove, Surrey, Toronto, Vernon, Victoria are just some of the municipal governments that have said this is the wrong thing for the government to do.
We have heard from a host of different groups. They have protested because they realize the voluntary survey will only be filled out by a fraction of Canadians, possibly if they work very hard at it, up to 65% of Canadians. The people who will not be represented are the ones who will not fill out the form. They are the ones who are most in need of the policies of the Government of Canada, the ethnic minorities and linguistic minorities. At the moment the Canadian Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities is taking the government to court to try to get it to reverse its decision.
I will give my place now to the hon. member for St. Paul's. We will be debating this motion all day long, but I certainly hope the arguments that are presented today will make the government reconsider this ill-advised step for the benefit of all Canadians.