Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond to the comments made earlier by the hon. member for Burnaby South concerning the products eliminated by Statistics Canada between 2006 and 2015.
As we have mentioned before, our government shares the concerns of the hon. member with regard to a robust national statistical agency and has promised to make evidence-based decisions.
With respect to the more than 539 cancelled products that my hon. colleague referred to, it is important to note that this list includes all sorts of products. Some products were cancelled simply as part of the normal process of the statistics system, whereas others were not designed as a permanent part of the statistics system.
In any event, large cuts were made to Statistics Canada's budget between 2006 and 2015, which hurt the national statistical system. We must recognize that Statistics Canada carefully implemented these cuts with a view to minimizing the impact on essential statistics and that it avoided certain program reductions, in part with the additional support provided by other federal departments and organizations.
Statistics Canada has assured us that none of the programs essential to fiscal and monetary policy and none of the data required for the administration of important federal transfer payments were affected by the cuts.
I also want to point out that we share the member's desire to revive our national statistical system, and to do so, we will have to consider the needs of today and tomorrow. We are listening to Canadians, researchers, scientists, and decision-makers to understand and identify their information needs, and we will make sure that we meet those needs.
We want to ensure that they have the data required to make evidence-based decisions, and that this data is open, transparent, timely, and accessible.
We restored the mandatory long form census and we are committed to making Statistics Canada more independent.
Over the course of our term, we intend to breathe new life into Statistics Canada's programs and to restore their relevancy, in a thoughtful and enlightened way.
I hope that we will be able to count on the support of the hon. member and his party as we work on this.