Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Statistics Canada for the work that it does. It is so important.
This bill moves us in the right direction in giving more independence to Statistics Canada. There is the right balance in the bill as the minister still has the ability to overrule. That provision still exists.
What we have here is the chief statistician determining the methods and what data is going to be collected. It is so important to have somebody who really understands the difference; otherwise a decision can be made which may be well meaning but may result in a problem where voluntary data, for example, is skewed in a way that is unknown, because it cannot be determined why people do not return the survey.
We are moving in the right direction with the right balance of independence of Statistics Canada and a bit of oversight from the minister, and a little bit of independence from having to go with whatever Shared Services is going to dictate, because let us keep in mind that this is very confidential information with different criteria. If we put some extra protection in there to make sure the data is secure and does not go to interests that might not be friendly to us, that would be a good thing.