Mr. Speaker, this year is the 350th anniversary of the first census done in what is now Canada. We have been doing a census for centuries here in Canada.

I want to thank my great colleague, the member for Burnaby—Douglas, for his thoughtful remarks. I also want to thank all the people from across the country who have communicated and spoken out about the issue of the long form census over the last few months.

I want to start by addressing the criticisms of my colleagues from the Conservative caucus.

The Conservatives claim that Stats Canada would be required to publish information on more than 350 surveys a year in the Canada Gazette and that this would be burdensome. This is not at all the intent of the bill. The legislation would only require publication of a minister's order, and then only if the order was with regard to the technical, scientific, or professional guidelines established by the chief statistician. I believe that this is a misreading of the bill, but I would be happy to address any concerns of the government and support appropriate amendments in committee.

The government also says that changing the manner of appointing the chief statistician would blur the accountability of the chief statistician and that it would prefer that the chief statistician be treated like any other deputy minister, as he is currently. The point here is that the Canadian people must trust that StatsCan is providing unbiased, unvarnished information and is not unduly influenced by the government of the day. Is this a real problem? The chief statistician resigned in 2010 in order to protect the integrity of Statistics Canada. My bill would ensure that the chief statistician was still accountable to the minister. However, if the minister wished to use his prerogative to overrule the chief statistician on technical or methodological matters, he could. He just would have to do it in the public eye, that is, in the Canada Gazette.

The government also opposes the bill because it would allow the chief statistician to choose the questions. I am happy to compromise on that. That is not central to the bill, and I am happy to compromise on that.

The government is also worried about Canada having to adhere to international standards for official statistics. In fact, it is the other way around. Canada played a significant role in establishing the United Nations “Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics”, which members can look up on the Internet. We are actually telling the rest of the world how to do official statistics.

The government also says that the bill does not go far enough in eliminating the threat of a jail term. My bill would eliminate a jail term for refusing to fill out the census truthfully. There are other mentions of jail terms in the Statistics Act, but they do not concern individuals filling out the census and are outside the scope of the bill, so this is not a relevant criticism.

Moreover, since the government brings up this issue, the Canadian people have to ask why the Conservative government chose not to eliminate the jail term itself. It is only one line. In any one of the government omnibus bills we have had in the past few years, the government chose to not eliminate the jail term. This contradicts what the government has said tonight.

People are worried about coerciveness. There is a cost to getting good information. We have to spend many hours and fill out forms and give the government a lot of information when we file our income taxes. We have a duty to pay taxes so that our government can protect us and can strive for values like justice and equality of opportunity. Filling out the census is the same. It is doing one's duty to one's country.

On the question of privacy or intrusiveness, I would submit to Canadians that the Conservatives cannot be counted on as guardians of privacy. For example, one threat to privacy is all the electronic and online surveillance that is going on. StatsCan asks us where we work, then locks up the information. It only releases aggregate numbers. Other groups may know who we sent an email to last night or what website we visited, and we were not even asked.

Given that the voluntary national household survey cost $22 million more than the long form census, how can good Conservatives vote for a voluntary survey that costs taxpayers more and provides poorer data? How can good Conservatives vote to kill the long form census when the Conservative New Brunswick premier said that it is now harder to measure the results of money spent on fighting poverty?

The fight over this bill is a fight over the soul of this country. It is a fight over whether Canadians should collect information about ourselves so that we may have solid evidence with which to govern ourselves wisely.

Let us vote for a competitive country where public health, business investment, economic management, and local government service delivery is done in a smart, informed, and efficient way. Let us vote for a country where we assess social programs using real data and know how to cut the ones that are not effective, where collecting solid data is not about bigger government or smaller government but smarter government. Let us vote for a country that does not accidentally look more middle class and equal than it really is just because of poor statistics. Let us vote for a country where knowledge and wisdom guide us, where we acknowledge our civic duty to provide information for the common good through informed governance.

Let us bring back the long form census.

Ted Hsu

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