Mr. Speaker, this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me because I was industry critic back in 2010 when the whole issue of the long form census originally came up. As my colleague from Kingston and the Islands has said, we will support the bill.
I will do it in part because it is a legacy issue for my good friend from Elgin—Middlesex—London. However, I want to point out that this support in no way absolves the government of an extremely bad decision that it made back in 2010 and for which we are now paying a heavy price. We have made it very clear that we will change this if we become the government after the next election.
I remember back in 2010 when out of the blue the then minister of industry, who is now the President of the Treasury Board, said that we would no longer have a compulsory, mandatory, long form census questionnaire. Why? Because he thought it was intrusive. For example, he thought we should not be asking Canadians certain questions because it would be an infringement on their privacy.
That was the initial argument that was presented, and at the time, the opposition parties mobilized so we could have some extraordinary industry committee meetings, which occurred after Parliament had risen for the summer. An absolute flood of people applied to be witnesses to appear before the committee because they wanted to express themselves on this very badly reasoned decision on the part of the Conservative government.
We kept a list, and by the time the committee meetings had finished that summer, over 300 organizations very clearly indicated that this was a very bad decision. In the process, we were jeopardizing the most important database for formulating social policy in our country.
We in the Liberal Party believe in the value of good science and good data with which to guide our decisions. Certainly for formulating policy, this is an important tool. Everybody said it, including people like Ivan Fellegi, who had become world renowned as the head of Statistics Canada because of the reputation we had for collecting this kind of a database that really helped us to make good policy.
Events have proven us right since that time. From a completion rate of 93.5%, we have now gone down to 68.5%. The problem is that the 31.5% of people who have not filled out the form, most of them are people on whom we really need to have data, people who are perhaps new arrivals in our country, people who are poor, people from certain ethnic groups or first nations groups on whom it is important to have accurate data.
Everybody knows today that we have paid a terrible price through the census that we did in 2011, using the national household survey, which was not mandatory. We hope a new government will have the chance to re-establish the way it was done by the time of the next census in 2016.
However, as these witnesses appeared before the industry committee and very clearly pointed out the error of the government's ways, it was very interesting to hear how the arguments were changing. As it evolved, the argument was no longer, “This is intrusive”, but “It's wrong to threaten somebody with sending them to jail if they decide not to fill it out”, hence the decision by the government today to try to make up for that. As we know, the Conservatives made a promise after the 2011 election that they would get rid of it because it was their primary argument for not allowing the compulsory long form census.
The reality is this. I checked at that time and was told that one person had gone to jail and that person had chosen to go jail. There had been some contempt in fact. The person wanted to make a point and did not want to pay the fine. The reality was that the Government of Canada was extremely reluctant to use that tool. It generally would try many other ways before getting to the point of even fining a person.
Therefore, it was not as if people were being thrown in jail left, right and centre because they were not completing the long form census. It was an argument that turned out to be a shoddy one because the reality is that Statistics Canada, in order to get the high rate that provides a thorough database, used to bend over backwards to try to get people to fill it out properly. That included deploying resources to enable them to do it. In some cases Statistics Canada clearly recognized that people had difficulty with the official languages. It recognized that certain people who were in the lower socio-economic levels did not have this as a priority, that they had bigger priorities in their lives, and that there was some encouragement and help that was required. There was a follow-through in order to try to make the database as complete as possible. Quite remarkable efforts were deployed for some of our first nations and Inuit who required some additional assistance from Statistics Canada so that they too would be part of this database.
Much effort was put into this in order to help Canadians fill out the form and very reluctantly would the government ever go to the final step of either fining or using the jail option.
This evening, by supporting a private member's bill, we are in no way condoning this government's very bad decision to eliminate the mandatory long form census five years ago.
As I mentioned, this form made it possible to have a top-quality database, which truly represented all of Canada and allowed us to formulate social policies based on real situations.
As we know very well, when the long form was mandatory, the participation rate was 93.5%. I believe that was the case for the 2006 census. However, after the government decided to make it voluntary, the participation rate dropped to 68.5%. Unfortunately, this has seriously affected the quality of data because, in reality, almost two-thirds of Canadians chose not to participate in the census.
In closing, I would add that at the time the government told us that its new method would cost much less. In fact, the method used for the 2011 census cost more money than what we spent in 2006, while the quality of the results obtained was vastly inferior.
Although we will support the bill before us tonight, we do not condone the government's decision, which was a very bad one. We are prepared to support this bill. However, if there is a change of government this fall, let us keep in mind that a Liberal government will definitely reinstate the long form census.
