Mr. Speaker, I would disagree. It is a fallacy to assume that just because services are pooled that efficiencies are created. I would point to the Phoenix debacle, the payment system for public servants being a classic fail. In fact, hundreds of millions of dollars, about $400 million, has gone to just clean that up.
Shared services is becoming such an issue. Again, what we get out of Statistics Canada is a money maker in many respects. When we look at it, we sell the data that has actually been accumulated. Personal data and privacy is protected, but businesses and third parties, universities and others, purchase products from that. They are purchasers of those products, paying millions of dollars to buy them. What they have said is they like the independence of Statistics Canada as a preferred product, and they would pay for that service. We saw statistics erode, in terms of the usefulness, in terms of selling it to the business sector, and our profits went down.
For this issue, the gold star of statistic management and maintenance is the independence, away from shared services. It is well identified by all research and other capacities. It is also less adverse to risk, because it is not exposed to the greater population of contamination possibilities, versus that of it being more secure and safety-sealed in its own usage. Again, the customers who are purchasing the data do so because of its reliability.
Giving up that income stream for an ideological stance of just throwing it all together is not always the most efficient way of doing things. If that was always the case, just putting everything together, assuming that costs are going to be lowered, then we would not even have a small business.