Industry committee  Yes, sure. As I said before, I think the most important thing is the question of whether or not there's a sentiment that it's part of your civic duty to fill it out. I think the fines and the penalty are relatively irrelevant relative to that. Absolutely there's a discretion ove

Industry committee  Right.

Industry committee  Yes, absolutely.

Industry committee  Well, I think it is critical. I won't speculate on the motive to privatize. I don't think you need to speculate on that. I mean, there's a legitimate reason to look at it. It is intrusive. That's why I'm amazed, when people are asked whether the questions that are floating around

Industry committee  Absolutely--and proceeded without those questions, absolutely.

Industry committee  Again, the fact that one in five might not respond is not terribly relevant. Having something like 25 million Canadians respond to a survey would be overwhelming. Angus Reid would do a survey with 1% and consider that to be a huge survey. The labour force survey is only 40,000 ho

Industry committee  I do worry that the longer this continues, the lower the response rate we'll get. We have been reasonably successful without enforcing fines, and there has never been prison. People feel it's a duty to fill this out, and whether they want to or not they do it and off it goes; the

Industry committee  I think the perception could be that it would create difficulty in conforming to other voluntary and mandatory.... The other thing that's important to note is that in almost every survey, as was indicated, the reason we can get reliable data from very small samples is because we

Industry committee  Well, this is the alternative to a census like the one we have in Canada or in the United States. You use administrative records. Several Scandinavian countries already do this, and this is something that the United Kingdom has indicated it wants to study for 2016. You are abso

Industry committee  You're absolutely right on the process. The questions are always put to cabinet. As Mr. Bernier indicated, the 2006 census would have gone to cabinet in 2005. At the latest, the questions for the 2011 census will go to cabinet in December 2010. They're proposed by Statistics Cana

Industry committee  Well, of course we have no idea whether they approved a set of questions, because they proposed a different form. So I have no basis on which to speculate what happened in the cabinet discussion. On a normal basis, yes, whatever questions were in the 2001 and 2006 censuses woul

Industry committee  But all the questions on the existing long form are mandatory, as they are in the short. So there is no grey area there at the moment.

Industry committee  If there are questions on which the answers can be readily gotten from other sources and there is not a profound reason to believe there will be a bias in that response, they don't need to be on the long form of the census. That is the sort of deliberation that I think needs to t

Industry committee  Actually, it's interesting that you paired the two, because I think you've picked out the two parts of the long form of the census that are not necessary. I'll declare my bias; in 23 years as a finance official, my approach to any policy issue is exactly the same: what is the p

Industry committee  Right off the bat, the municipalities have told us that when they're designing their water systems and they're designing the sewers, they use that. So yes, you could do without it, but then you're going to have a less efficient system.