Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that I will share my time with the member for Gatineau. It is a good thing we are not having a talent show today, because my voice might go up or down a few octaves. The flu is setting in all over.
My thoughts on Statistics Canada's long form census, which the government wants to change from mandatory to voluntary, are very clear. The government is trying to discourage the large percentage of people who responded to the mandatory long form census. At the same time, in a way, the government wants to disengage from more humane and socially oriented policies.
Some time ago—even some years ago—the government set about cutting subsidies and bursaries for human and social science research centres. Hon. members will recall that there was a huge outcry over this. Today, we still get the feeling that the government does not want to assume its responsibilities, because it does not want to have an accurate portrait of Quebec and Canadian society at five-year intervals. This portrait can initiate policy development, especially social policy, but policies in other sectors as well.
Everyone probably knows an urban planner somewhere. I was a municipal councillor and I recently spoke to the urban planner in charge of statistics. He said the government is under the impression that it is paying for these people to gather information that other people end up using. It is not a big deal because the work needs to be done. They have general information, but to make the information more specific and to interpret the information these people also have to spend a great deal of time making the information relevant to the municipality or to the region. It is labour intensive.
On August 27, I had the opportunity to attend a committee meeting where there were three groups of witnesses who, I must admit, were there to support keeping the mandatory long form census. Very few people were there to support the government's action to make the form voluntary.
At the previous meeting—to set the date for a meeting of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology in order to continue talking about the census—the government initially wanted no part of it because it could not come up with credible witnesses to support its position. Nevertheless, it was striking to see the differences and to see what motivated each group.
Proponents of maintaining the long form census are all, or almost all, in agreement. Take Mel Cappe, president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, for example. He knows all about government and the federal public service. He was appointed by order in council as a deputy minister under Brian Mulroney. He is a former clerk of the Privy Council and cabinet secretary to Mr. Chrétien. He is finishing his career in loyal service to the current Prime Minister. This man was thoroughly impartial in this testimony. What he told us was in no way partisan. He said that he had written four letters to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Industry. He did not receive a response from the Prime Minster and received only an acknowledgment of receipt from the Minister of Industry's office.
It was very clear to Mr. Cappe that the long form census is in the public's general interest. It also responds to the public's needs. It allows us to track emerging trends, needs and public concerns.
Obviously, it is mandatory, which deeply disturbs the Conservatives. And they know full well that a large segment of the population will not fill out the questionnaire if it is voluntary.
If it were simply a statistical issue and the proportion of people who did not fill it out were equal to the proportion that did, then maybe nothing would change. But we know what happens in these situations. People do not necessarily see it as an obligation, but they see it as their responsibility to help create fair and equitable policies in this society. But with voluntary participation, there will be groups of people who will not answer, groups of people living in specific circumstances. So we will not have any information on these groups of people, which will make a voluntary questionnaire useless, in practice.
Numerous people, even internationally, have stated that Canadian statistics will be useless, or close to it, and that they will not be trustworthy and will not have any credibility.
As we know, the Canadian Institute of Planners has taken the same stand. It uses the data often, if not all the time, for short-term as well as medium- and long-term planning. In fact, we know very well that we must be able to forecast certain population movements and compare them from census to census. This will no longer be possible commencing next year if the government does not change its policy.
As Mr. Cappe stated, we must produce reliable and robust data. He also talked about minimizing coercion, minimizing the intrusion into people's private lives and maximizing respect for the confidentiality of the data. As for confidentiality and privacy, I reread the 2006 questionnaire. I could not really say which questions were truly invasive or of a personal nature in the questionnaire. My responses to the questionnaire could have been published in my region's daily newspaper without my permission and it would not have bothered me. There was nothing special there.
Groups that concurred with the government and claimed to represent many organizations with hundreds of thousands of members said quite seriously, with a straight face, that more people would fill out the questionnaire if it were voluntary. On the contrary, it was clear from the presentations that people would not. As I was saying earlier, an identifiable group of people would no longer participate in the census if it were voluntary. Therefore, data would be missing and in the end, the government would have less success in creating sound policies.
This affects many areas of activity. We must reinstate the mandatory questionnaire in order to establish and implement policies that meet the needs of the people, sometimes those who are more marginalized. The government is always swimming against the current. People increasingly believe that they are required to participate in this evolution of society by having as much information as possible on a given date.
It is obvious that this government is not concerned with the social sciences. We need only look to the Canadian Association for Business Economics, which is also opposed to this decision that it maintains was made “without serious consultation with the broad population of data users”.
Furthermore, according to the association, “Decisions are made regularly by business and government about the location of resources and new initiatives based on the data in the long form.”
Even economists are saying that we must keep it.
