Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this motion. I commend my colleague who brought this motion forward.
I will be splitting my time with the member for Don Valley West.
There are a number of terms that get used in the House far too often. One of those terms is “unprecedented”. When members talk about something that is unprecedented they seem to be talking about things that have not happened for 72 hours. It becomes part of the vernacular here.
However, I think the number of people who have come together to say that this decision on the long form census is foolish is entirely unprecedented.
The response to this decision has brought together groups from east, west, north, south, left and right, religious and secular, business and labour. People have come together to talk about this senseless census consensus. All agree that it makes no sense to do this.
Recently, I received a copy of a letter sent by the mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality. He did not copy it to all Atlantic members, as he usually does. This letter was to the hon. Minister of Industry. It states, “The mandatory requirement for people to complete the long form census results in a validity and comprehensiveness of data that is not likely to be achieved under a voluntary system”.
That is our mayor, Peter Kelly of HRM, slamming this Conservative government. We will see if he continues to do that.
This has caught people off guard. No one can understand it. Some people say that it is simply dumb. That is a charitable assessment. I do not think that the government was dumb on this issue. It might be dumb on other things, I will give them credit for that, but on this I do not think it was dumb at all.
I think this was done purposely. The Conservative government knows the value of information. It does not want to have to use it to make or justify decisions. It does not want to know what governments might be able to do based on need, because it does not believe that the government has a role in assisting people who need help.
The best characterization of this decision was made this summer at a round table held in Winnipeg by my colleague from Winnipeg South Centre. A University of Manitoba professor, a non-political person with no axes to grind, came and expressed amazement at this. She said that in this country the government is going from evidence-based policy to policy-based evidence.
We see this all the time. The government comes up with a conclusion and then it manufactures the evidence to justify it. It makes it up out of thin air in many cases. Governments are supposed to believe in evidence and information.
I think the government uses information when it suits it. Imagine that big war room somewhere in Ottawa, with apparatchiks sitting around computers and making calls for money, doling out false information about opposition members. I bet the government is not asking for less information from their donors. They know the value of information when it comes to that.
We have a Conservative government that does not want information but a Conservative Party that does. It knows how to use money. It knows how to use wedges in society. Unlike most governments in Canada, Liberal and Progressive Conservative, that see a wedge in society and want to bring those people together, this government wants to drive them farther apart.
The Conservative Party wants all the information it can get. The Conservative government wants to take a Sergeant Schultz approach: “I know nothing and therefore I can do nothing to make things better”.
We heard this argument from the Minister of Industry in the summer hearings. He said, “We believe it is not appropriate to threaten jail. God forbid, somebody actually takes it to the limit and actually fines himself with a three-month jail sentence for objecting to answering those personal questions”.
We hear this all the time. It is the most ridiculous thing we could ever imagine. Here is a solution. I offer it at no charge to the government. Let us have amnesty for all those Canadians languishing in Canadian jails because they did not fill out the census. We could do it by noon and it is one minute till noon now. It would be the cheapest, easiest amnesty in the history of this country. No one has gone to jail for not filling out the long form census. It is a ridiculous allegation.
The member for St. Paul's is proposing it in her legislation. We support it. Change that. There is no problem, but do not take away the integrity of our long form census.
I want to talk about a group that is going to be really hurt by this. They are among the people who are most marginalized. A lot of people who work with people who live in poverty are saying they cannot do their work if they do not have the information. They know that in many cases the government most likely does not want to have the information, because it does not want to assist. It does not want to have the evidence. It does not want to know who is poor. It does not want to know who is disabled.
It is unbelievable that we would actually have a government that would bring in a policy that hurts the people who are most marginalized, but it is a trend. The PAL survey, which studies participation and active living among people with disabilities, was cancelled.
Laurie Beachell, who is with the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, said, “We have a huge challenge here. We had something that was working”. It's gone.
This spring, the government finally ratified the UN convention on the rights for the disabled. There was some hope in the disability community that, finally, people were going to listen to them, in the current government. For the first time, they thought something positive was going to happen.
However, we have the cancellation of the PAL survey. On top of that, we have the double whammy of the long form census. We could even go further to say that the Canadian Council on Learning, which brought information together on learning and looked at vulnerable populations, was cancelled as well. That makes no sense whatsoever.
As Mr. Carney from the Bank of Canada put it, a non-trivial range of data will be affected.
That is a pretty delicate way of putting it, compared with many others.
However, people in the disability community are saying that this is not a small problem for them. It is a huge problem.
I am quoting from an article from Canwest:
The Canadian Hard of Hearing Association, a national organization representing millions of Canadians who live with hearing loss, urges the Government of Canada to immediately revoke its recent decision to eliminate the mandatory long form Canadian census questionnaire.... The long form mandatory questionnaire is normally sent to 20% of households. It is a crucial source of information about disability, diversity, employment, income, education and other issues. This information is used to provide a solid foundation for good legislation, public policies and programs.
Louise Normand, the national president of the association, said, “Throwing out the mandatory long form questionnaire flies in the face of international commitments that Canada made only a few short months ago”.
There are people across this country, specifically people in the not-for-profit organizations, the charitable groups, the health foundations, and social agencies, who need this help.
We have heard from the marketing groups. We have heard from just about every single religious organization in this country. We have heard from chambers of commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. We have heard from all kinds of municipalities. We have heard from provinces.
I specifically want to provide a voice today, in this discussion, for Canadians with disabilities, the people that every member, all 308 members of this House, would agree are worthy of attention and assistance. Individually, everybody would say that these people deserve help. To many people, Canada is the standard of how to treat people who need help the most. We are not as great as we should be, and we are not as great as we sometimes think we are. However, I am sure that every member of this House would say that they want to be there for Canadians with disabilities, that they want to be the one who provides assistance, equal opportunity. They want to be the one who stands and says that if people, especially through no fault of their own, have been dealt a hand that causes them to need some assistance, they will be glad to provide it.
We believe that government has a role in assisting people with disabilities. Yet we have a policy on the census that flies in the face of that. It would mean that people would not be counted and people would not have their information taken. Then the government would be able to say that it does not have the information, that it cannot assist those people, that it does not even know what they need, because it has not counted them. What makes it even worse is that the government knew what it was doing.
Today's Globe and Mail quotes Rosemary Bander, assistant chief statistician as saying that some survey data “will not be usable for a range of objectives for which the census information would be needed”.
So, what we have had is this incredible consensus, this unbelievable and unprecedented senseless census consensus in Canada. Our government is not acting in the best interests of people in this country. People with disabilities, people who are living a marginal existence, aboriginal groups, minority language groups: these people who rely on this information will not have it. Nor will they be able to index it to previous years, because the data integrity will be violated.
As amazing as it is, we now have a situation where the Government of Canada is in essence saying that it does not even want to know about Canadians' problems. It is not its fault, concern, or priority. It does not want to be there. It does not want to have the information it needs to make decisions.
I would suggest to hon. members and to Canadians that this is now how the country usually operates. That is not the Canada most Canadians believe in.