Industry committee  No, actually, they envy us. The other countries come to look at our system and say they wish they had what we have.

Industry committee  The statistics agencies of other countries have said it's an issue for them because they can't take money and carry out statistical work. In some cases it doesn't happen, in which case it's a loss to everybody. The society doesn't get the data. In other cases, the survey may be carried out by an academic or private sector survey firm, but the data is held by the department that paid for it and not made public.

Industry committee  Let me be clear. The cost recovery I was talking about is a thing of the past. The pricing of our products and services, the restrictions on re-dissemination, that's all gone. Our standard product is free. Our data's free on the Internet. Anybody can take it. Anybody can re-disseminate it.

Industry committee  We're well aware of the CREA index. We're also very well aware of the National Bank Teranet, I think, that produces an index of housing prices—

Industry committee  We're aware of their methods. We've looked at it with Finance Canada as to whether these indices on their own would meet the requirement, and the view was that the level of quality wasn't sufficient.

Industry committee  No. CREA's data may well be reliable for the purposes for which it was developed and intended, but for the purposes of—

Industry committee  When you're building a price index, it's more about the issue of controlling for the variation and the quality of the housing. Otherwise, the price movements may simply be a change in the average quality of the housing. It's about controlling for those kinds of factors, and that is not their intent, so I'm not faulting them or suggesting that their data is unreliable for any purpose for which people may currently be using it.

Industry committee  We got into cost recovery.... Well, I guess we've always been in cost recovery to some extent. It became a significant factor in the mid-eighties. There was a census in 1986 that was cancelled and then reinstated. At Statistics Canada, as part of the reinstatement package, we were asked to generate a much larger amount of money from the sale of our products and services.

Industry committee  Well, I'm prohibited by law from divulging any information about an individual business. What I can tell you is that all of the businesses in that industry that actually received money from the federal Business Development Bank, for example, did they do better than businesses that did not, or did they do the same or worse.

Industry committee  SDDS plus is a series of measures that have been proposed by the International Monetary Fund to measure the financial health of countries. There was an initial round called SDDS, which stands for special data documentation standard. What it is, as I said, is a series of measures that when you look at them can say that a country is in good shape financially, or there's some serious issues developing in terms of the financial system.

Industry committee  We have in place a broad infrastructure that allows measurement of growth down to individual industries and to reconstitute.... To use clean tech as an example of what we're able to do, part of the proposal around clean tech is.... This is not a standard industry that is defined by Statistics Canada, so our first problem is that we have to define it.

Industry committee  I am not agreeing with the description of the facts.

Industry committee  No data leaves Canada. It doesn't leave the possession of Statistics Canada, actually. The microdata, the actual responses, we control it completely.

Industry committee  I'd like to comment on Lockheed Martin, if I could. It was Lockheed Martin Canada. No data was taken out of Canada. It was never planned to be.

Industry committee  Well, I challenge the facts; I don't think that's the essence. They were originally brought on to develop systems for processing, because we were trying to move the processing initially in an entirely different way. Initially, they were supposed to be in the data centre, operating the data centres, but under Statistics Canada management and control.