Mr. Speaker, sometimes it seems to me that the Conservative government is nurturing a simplistic and outdated image of the society in which we live.
It thinks that modern society is exactly like a little old-fashioned town where everybody knows everybody and the local economy is based on exchanges between buyers, producers and sellers that are all the same size and nobody has more power than anybody else. The market is truly free and unfettered, with no distortion of competition. Everybody is on an equal playing field. The market and the economy are efficient.
In this imaginary society, everything is out in the open and people get the news by word of mouth. There is no need for statistical data to paint a picture of one's community. Problems are simple and so are solutions.
However, the society we live in today looks nothing like the Conservatives' notion of it. The infrastructure is complex. Even small towns are linked together within administrative regions that provide increasingly complex services, including health services, to the people.
People in the same region do not necessarily all know one another. To paint a picture of an area and its needs, we need to be able to collect data, often with the help of sampling techniques. In other words, we need to take a census of the population. To analyze long-term trends, we must collect data consistently over a long period.
For the data to be accepted by the public and used as a basis for decisions that are truly democratic and in the public interest, the public must be of the opinion that the data are accurate and were not compiled somewhat artificially in order to influence public debate and promote the political, economic or socio-cultural interests of one group of citizens over another.
In a complex, modern world, statistics are our collective lens. They allow us to see a reality that otherwise would be invisible to us, invisible to democratic decision makers. When the government decided suddenly to eliminate the long form census, it broke a piece of that lens. It distorted our view of how things really were.
There is perhaps no more convincing an example of how the government's sudden decision to end the long form census has compromised informed decision making in the interest of community than the case of David Hulchanski. As an aside, the government claims to care about community, but its decisions in fact undermine the community interest.
As theToronto Star has pointed out about the Hulchanski case:
This is one of the first documented cases of the damage done by the Conservative government’s 2010 decision to scrap Canada’s mandatory, full-length census.
David Hulchanski is a pioneer urban planner who dedicated five years to create the “the most sophisticated tool to track urban poverty ever devised”. The project used 531 census tracks to discern changes that had been taking place over time in the city of Toronto. I hope my colleagues from that area are listening carefully. Through his research, Dr. Hulchanski discerned that the assumed demographics of Toronto had changed over time, that areas of poverty had gradually moved from the centre of the city, which was becoming gentrified, to the city's outer rings.
These findings were somewhat counterintuitive, but they led to the conclusion that most of Toronto's social service agencies were in the wrong place.
Using the same methodology, Mr. Hulchanski developed maps for Montreal and Vancouver. According to the Toronto Star:
He secured funding to expand his project to Halifax, Winnipeg, Calgary and Chicago, waiting expectantly for the 2011 census so he could move forward.
Just as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council approved his seven-year grant, [the President of the Treasury Board] dropped the guillotine.
Without the accurate data that the long form census provided, his methodology was “useless”. Not easily discouraged, Mr. Hulchanski tried to patch together other indicators, including income tax files, real estate data, municipal and school board records and the like, but these were insufficient to allow him to realize his statistical objectives.
Then he attempted to use the national household survey, which proved to be a dead-end. In fact, using the survey, his results contradicted the patterns that emerged in the long form census data. That, no doubt, was because the household survey was plagued by high non-response rates.
Sadly and ironically, Mr. Hulchanski's work ground to a standstill, except outside Canada in Chicago. So it was Chicago, not Toronto, that would ultimately benefit from the Conservative government's decision to kill the long form census.
In closing, I congratulate my hon. colleague for this bill. Because of his educational and professional background as a nuclear physicist, and later as a financial trader, he understands the vital importance of accurate information as the basis for effective decision-making. He is also someone who respects the institutions we have built for ourselves here in the northern half of the North American continent.
Colleagues will remember that in 2013, he was chosen by his colleagues in the House as the parliamentarian who best represented his constituents. The member for Kingston and the Islands does not let blind and emotional partisanship inhibit his search for truthful answers to the challenges we face as a nation. He brings through the bill that same ethical spirit to his vision for Statistics Canada, which should be free of political interference so that data can be gathered accurately and in a consistent manner, allowing us to draw comparisons on the state of our communities over time so that we can observe meaningful trends in the evolution of our great country and be able to make wise public policy decisions that can make Canada even greater.