Mr. Speaker, the member asked an interesting question.
In my previous life, I was a registrar in the human resources profession, where I dealt with large volumes of personal information. As the registrar, I was also responsible for making sure our 6,000 members in the province of Alberta were doing their due diligence when dealing with their employees' private information. I would ask what types of incentives were wanted. When I was there, we started an Alberta human resources trends survey all across the province with 6,000 of our members. We did not need punitive fines. We actually offered incentives. We would say that if all 6,000 members filled out a survey, we would have better data, so there was some self-interest at play for people to fill it out correctly. We also put their names in a random lottery draw, and that was our way of enticing people to fill out the survey.
I am not saying Statistics Canada should go this route, but in a not-for-profit private sector that is what we did. Our response rate was nearly 20%, which is well above what most people expect to get in a public information survey or a public policy poll. We were getting steady 20% responses over the lifetime of the survey.
That survey has now expanded to all western Canadian provinces. It is called the western HR trends survey, and every single professional association from British Columbia to Manitoba is now participating in it. Well over 10,000 members are filling out a survey without any type of fine being levied. There is some self-interest in knowing more about their particular field. The same applies for all Canadians. Canadians are interested in knowing about Canadian society, and businesses are the same way. With that valuable information, I do not believe necessarily that a fine needs to be levied. In some cases it might have to be levied, but not all the time.