Canada's new Liberal government has started rolling back Conservative policy by resurrecting the mandatory long-form census survey cancelled by the previous administration for ideological reasons.
Navdeep Bains, the minister of innovation, science and economic development, said today it will reinstate the mandatory portion of the survey in order to produce "reliable, good-quality data."
Bains says the Conservatives replaced it with the voluntary National Household Survey in 2010 citing privacy concerns and because they considered the data an excuse to waste money on programs.
Bains says Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sworn in Wednesday, is focused on sound, evidence based policies. He noted the participation rate on the voluntary survey was 77 percent compared to 93.5 for the last mandatory census.
