I'd like to thank everyone for coming out. Your testimony has been very compelling and powerful.
Perhaps I'll start with Ms. Regehr.
You said something that's quite interesting. Having read the clerk's notes, and I hope I have this correct, you mentioned that you were in some way consulted back in the 1990s on question 33. I agree, and was hoping, that it would be a lot more finite and a lot more detailed rather than eliminated.
That said, looking back in history, and to your point, Ms. Lahey, what's the problem with Statistics Canada in this particular question?
The clerk's notes indicate that historians reported that the federal government announced its intention to include the question on unpaid work in the census at the Beijing conference. That decision was the result of a cabinet decision that overruled Statistics Canada's advice. Right from the get go, Statistics Canada was a little adverse to even having it.
Ms. Lahey, you indicated that there are advocates to remove this question, which is quite bizarre. Statistics Canada appeared to have given us what was rather misleading testimony in terms of users of that particular data that was obtained by that question.
You were there at the beginning, Ms. Regehr. Do you have any sense of why there was an objection on the part of Statistics Canada to even include this question?