Mr. Speaker, I thank the centre for intellectual liberalism for his question. He mentioned he cut his teeth in politics in Toronto with the Ford brothers. Their pedagogic influence is very clear.
The member said that I did not speak to the bill and then proceeded to ask a question that showed he did not really know the detail of the bill himself. We currently have a mandatory long-form census. Of course, the Conservative government never proposed to do away with the long-form census. While encouraging people to fill it out, we did not make it mandatory. However, the Liberals made the census mandatory again. The bill would not in any way change that reality.
I have spoken specifically about the provisions of the bill, changing the way in which the chief statistician is appointed, changing the powers the minister has with respect to statistical programs and procedures, and, yes, the abolition of the Canadian Statistics Advisory Council, replacing it with the National Statistics Council. The member's “the sky is falling” act is a little rich, but beyond that, it does not speak even to the details of the bill.