The centre of intellectual Toryism, Mr. Speaker.
They never wanted the facts. What they wanted was the anecdotal evidence. What we just had was a long presentation of anecdotal evidence, which has no bearing in reality whatsoever.
I did not hear the member opposite even talk about what was in the bill. He talked about virtually every other thing under the sun, except for the bill with any great sort of specific analysis.
One reason we need the long-form census and we need to start gathering statistics and evidence so governments can make decisions is precisely because the previous government's editing and destruction of the census process left major cities in a very difficult situation. The City of Toronto was suing the federal government because there was no process to count people who lived in high rise buildings. In fact, it left high rise buildings out of the equation.
In the riding I represent, three-quarters of which is high rise and condominiums in the downtown core of Toronto, people were not even asked to be counted, let alone enrolled in the census process. As a result of that, federal programs, largely dispensed on a per capita basis, left huge swaths of our country unaccounted for in the calculations and therefore unfunded with respect to the acquisition of infrastructure money and social service dollars that would be delivered to a major city. The short-form census had a devastating impact on equality in the country.
Do you support a long-form census, do you support accurate gathering of information, and if you do, why are you not supporting this bill?