Mr. Speaker, I was so looking forward to giving a 20-minute speech on this bill. It really pains me to be limited to 10 minutes, but again I appreciate the opportunity to speak.
The government prides itself on evidence-based policy. Statistics Canada is a critically important institution because it provides the evidence for that evidence-based policy. The independence of Statistics Canada is crucial because, without it, we might end up with policy-based evidence; we might end up with Statistics Canada producing information or failing to produce information in response to political directives. Therefore, if we are concerned about having good governance and evidence-based policy, it is really important that we have an independent professional statistics agency such as Statistics Canada. That is why this is an important piece of legislation.
Why is it a timely topic? It is a timely topic because, just in the past few years, we have had two chief statisticians resign in protest of a lack of independence for Statistics Canada.
The first one of these resignations was Munir Sheikh, who resigned in protest of the previous government's very strange decision to eliminate the mandatory long-form census. This was a decision that was objected to by almost every sector of society. It was a very odd decision. I do not know if it was an attempt to pander to certain libertarian elements, but there was never a big groundswell of Canadians who objected to having to fill out the census. It was once every decade in terms of the full census; or once every five years, if we include the partial census. Therefore, it was a very odd decision, and the chief statistician resigned to protest it.
We actually just had an interesting discussion in this House about the necessity for a mandatory long-form census. My colleague from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa said we do not actually need to make it mandatory because we can just rely on sampling and proper sampling techniques. However, in order to design the sample, they need to know what the whole population is. In order to know that the sample is representative, they have to at some point have done a census of the entire population. Therefore a mandatory complete census is really the necessary foundation for all of the good sampling work that my colleague was mentioning. He used the analogy of this Parliament, and he stated that if we asked all 338 MPs to respond to something, that would not be a sample; that would be the entire population. That is true enough.
However, let us try to imagine constructing a representative sample of the House of Commons. In order to do that, we would need to know something about the whole population. For example, we would need to know how many MPs are in each party caucus if we wanted our sample to have the right number of people from each party. We would need to know how many seats there are from each province in order to make sure our sample was regionally representative. Just using that rudimentary analogy, it is easy to see that people can do a lot of good research and statistical work based on sampling, but in order to construct those samples, they do periodically need to have some census of the entire population. That is why almost all advanced industrialized countries have these mandatory census practices periodically. It is a common-sense thing, and we are glad to have it back in Canada, although certainly, as some of my colleagues have pointed out, this legislation falls somewhat short in terms of making it truly mandatory.
The second chief statistician who resigned was Wayne Smith. He resigned quite recently, just in the past few months, to protest the way in which Statistics Canada's arrangement with Shared Services Canada had impaired the agency's independence. This is the real motivation for this bill being brought before the House.
The government, in response to this controversy of Wayne Smith's resignation, wants to be able to say that it is doing something to protect the independence of Statistics Canada, that it is taking action and dealing with the problem.
The odd thing is that this bill does not say anything about Statistics Canada's relationship with Shared Services Canada. It does not propose any sort of alternative model for Statistics Canada to get the IT services on which its important work depends.
While in terms of chronology and perhaps in terms of political positioning, the bill is a response to Mr. Smith's resignation, the content of the bill actually would not do anything to address the problems that motivated Mr. Smith's resignation.
We in the NDP are going to support this bill in order to get it before committee so we can try to make some improvements to it and so we can perhaps address some of these problems. However, it is important to note that in its current form this legislation would fall far short of dealing with what precipitated this crisis in Statistics Canada.
It is worth talking a bit about Shared Services Canada. This was really an attempt by the previous Conservative government to cut corners and to cut costs a bit and to say that, because it had IT services in many different departments and agencies, it would be more efficient to centralize them into one IT agency. There is some logic to that. One can imagine how it might have worked, but as with so many of these efforts in the federal government to centralize functions between departments and agencies, there were huge problems in the implementation and in the execution.
One issue with Shared Services Canada is that all departments and agencies were ordered to transfer their IT staff to the new Shared Services Canada, which made sense. However, Shared Services Canada needs more than IT professionals. It needs administrative assistants. It needs financial people. It needs other types of managers. The way those people were put in place was that all the other departments and agencies were told that they needed to send x number of administrative assistants, x number of accountants, etc., to Shared Services Canada.
What did the managers in these other departments and agencies do? Did they send their best and most reliable employees away? No, they used it as an opportunity to perhaps send people whom they were trying to remove from their organizations anyway. In that sense, Shared Services Canada was really set up to fail through bad implementation and bad execution.
However, even if we are able to fix Shared Services Canada and get it functioning properly, there is still a huge problem with making Statistics Canada totally reliant on this other entity. By definition, that impinges upon the independence of Statistics Canada. In setting up Shared Services Canada, the government did recognize that there were some agencies in government that were so sensitive they had to have control of their own IT. This Parliament that we are in right now is an example of that. Other countries such as Britain, Australia, and New Zealand also manage to exempt their statistical agencies from their centralized government-wide IT structures.
Mr. Smith has a valid point in suggesting that Statistics Canada could be exempt from Shared Services Canada, and I am really hoping that is something we can look at in committee after passing the bill in the current reading.
There is definitely room to consider other arrangements. Statistics Canada maybe could have its own IT capacity. Failing that, if we do want Statistics Canada to work with Shared Services Canada, maybe Statistics Canada could at least have the option of sometimes going to other suppliers if Shared Services Canada cannot provide the required support. However, one way or another, we need to find a way to give Statistics Canada the kind of technical support and the kind of IT infrastructure it needs to do this critically important research and to provide this critically important information and evidence. I am disappointed that the bill we are considering today really fails to address that problem at all.