Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise again on the issue of the census.
The government has killed the long form mandatory census and brought in a national survey. I asked the government about an NDP bill that would make the chief statistician independent and out of politics in order to guarantee the data that Canadians were providing would be useful for those in the scientific field. This is important because we make a lot of decisions based upon our census information.
Ironically, today at committee we had hearings about the census. One of the things we learned is that the government is going to spend $670 million on a census that it has not tested. We found no other society, no other country that, when moving to a national survey, did not run a sampling.
It is akin to an individual going to a car dealership and buying a car without taking it for a test drive. Would an individual get on a plane that was built but that had not been tested? No. We should have had some type of test in the development of the long form survey.
Today we heard from witnesses that they were never consulted. They were never even asked their opinion. We are talking about people who deal with this information on a daily basis. They use it for everything from deciding where public transit goes, where language supports go, how economic decisions are made, how we train our population and how we work as an organized civil society. All that information that we have been using in the past on a continuum from 1971 will now be made useless in many respects. We will not know the damage that will happen as rates and anomalies increase in this new national survey.
What is very odd about this is that if the government truly wanted to switch from a mandatory census, it could have consulted with a wide range of scientists and operators and people who are in the business. They would have been able to provide some input to mitigate and ameliorate those types of problems. But no, the government did not do that, so we have a $670 million gamble. That is $670 million that the government is borrowing from taxpayers. We are in a deficit right now. We will have to pay interest on that money.
The census is very important. There are customers who use it. Millions upon millions of dollars are put back into coffers to offset the cost of the actual census. That money could help the taxpayers in terms of reducing the costs of the census. We do not know if we will lose those customers. Those customers may evaporate. What is important is that it also affects other surveys. Surveys which are backed up by good, scientific data will now be lost.
Interestingly enough, the government will still not get rid of the mandatory agricultural survey. That will not be voluntary, so those individuals will be scoped by the government. The short form census will still exist, so there will be individuals under that purview as well.
Why is it that we would want to contaminate one set of very important data? Why would the Conservatives provide different sets of rules for different types of censuses? Why would they want to risk $670 million of the taxpayers' money without doing any type of pilot project or investigation?
When we have employment insurance reforms, we do pilot projects in communities to find out whether they are helping. We make sure we do due diligence. What has happened here is it has been thrown out the window. That is why the chief statistician needs to be independent and above politics. We need to make sure our scientific data is clean, is developed strongly and most important, is very secure and very reliable for actual census usage.