Industry committee  Well, a council has to reflect or express the needs of users, so diversity goes hand in hand with this, but at the same time, statistical councils in many countries also have a role in assessing quality, and here there's an element of expertise that comes in. So I think you must

Industry committee  Independence is mainly about maintaining credibility, I think. Quality depends a lot on the means that are provided to Statistics Canada, and that is not strictly a legal aspect. So I would think quality depends on assessing, on a regular basis, the programs, the results, the dat

Industry committee  My point of view was that there is some progress in that direction in the bill. It could be improved, but we are moving from a law in which there was no mention of this. There was a culture of independence, but nothing was written in law. Now we're moving to a law where it will b

Industry committee  In fact, Statistics Canada has been assisting government for a number of years. The data it produces goes into the policy process, so it's very closely connected. That's where part of the problem comes. It needs to be very close to government, but it also needs to be somewhat pro

Industry committee  I've read Dr. Thomas' brief. I would say his proposed amendments go in the direction of making public the changes. I think that's the general direction we should go. If the government, the minister, or the Governor in Council, considers that there should be an intervention in t

Industry committee  The long-form census is the census, so it's mandatory as it's written now. This long-form census ceased to exist in 2011. It was replaced by something very different, but the whole thing, the short and long forms, are the census. Now we may have another model. In the U.S. they

Industry committee  The preamble is symbolic up to a certain point, but with issues like independence, trust, and confidence, symbolism is important. Things could appear as a violation if they contradict the preamble, even though they might not strictly be illegal.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  Well, if we are talking about programs, there needs to be input from the political side to statistics, and there are various forums for this, including various councils where ministries can express their wishes. So that is one thing: the ability to ask for information on this and

Industry committee  I was going to say the same thing.

Industry committee  In many countries, ultimately the chief statistician is named by the government, by the equivalent of the Governor in Council. In some countries he may be nominated by Parliament, a bit like the Auditor General is. There are countries with quite an elaborate set of procedures for

Industry committee  In the case of Shared Services, according to the former chief statistician, there was a loss of control over decisions that could be made in regard to the data. The argument has been made that there's more cybersecurity or protection with Shared Services, but I would say that if

Industry committee  We've had all the problems with Shared Services that made the data unavailable during certain periods of time very recently.

Industry committee  Thank you. My name is Jean-Guy Prévost. I'm a professor in the Political Science Department at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Over the past 30 years, my research has focused on the census and on the functioning of statistical offices, not only from a Canadian perspective,