Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague opposite is making the assumption that to be professional it has to be a mandatory long-form census, which is clearly nonsense.
Again, to go back to sampling theory, it is extremely complex. If we consider all the members of Parliament in this House as a population, and we ask every one of them a question about something, that is not a sample. We are talking to the entire population, and what we get out of that is accurate.
However, in most cases, we are not able to ask an entire population a question or look at the population of the crop of wheat, for example, in western Canada, so we have to do a sample.
Of course, the qualifications of the statisticians and the type of sampling program they initiate is absolutely critical, but that has actually nothing to do with the mandatory long-form census.
I go back to the point that there are innumerable statistical studies in Canada, in North America, and around the world, that are not mandatory and that provide equally accurate information, assuming the sampling program is done competently.