Mr. Speaker,
Liberals repeatedly warned the government that the cancellation of the mandatory long form census would cause the participation rate to plummet.
Now we know that participation has fallen by over 25% and that 1 in 10 communities will not reach the 50% response level necessary for them to have data that they can use to plan their communities.
Most of these are the small and rural communities.
Why does the government continue to form policy based on ideology instead of evidence?
Hon. Mike Lake (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry, CPC):
Mr. Speaker,
The honourable member refers to ideology, and again I will say that this government does not hold the ideology that someone should be threatened with jail time because they do not want to tell the government what their religion is.
We do not believe that someone should be threatened with jail time because they do not want to say how many hours of housework they did or how much time they spent with their kids.
As I said before, StatsCan is continuing its data quality assessment of the data from the national household survey and will make the results available as this work is completed.
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