Mr. Speaker, that is an important question. If we do not have information and we do not have data on all segments of the population, all cities, small places, large cities, small areas, we do not have an understanding of where we are in time. How would we know how to create public policy to tell us where we are going when we do not know where we are?
I would like to again quote Munir Sheikh, the former head of Statistics Canada. He said that because of the cutting of the long form census and moving to this voluntary household survey, the data collection in our country would become “a piece of garbage”. The response to the mandatory long form census was 94%. Now it is 68%. We do not know the status of people's incomes, their job descriptions or their health. We do not know the status of anything.
Therefore, not only does industry not know how to make policies, but government does not know where to go to make policies. We have no idea of the lives of Canadians. I do not know of any country in the world that does this. It is such an ideologically-based problem.