Plans for banking info hints at larger trove

OTTAWA • Before Statistics Canada set out to scoop up private banking information from 500,000 Canadians it had already collected reams of corporate and individual tax forms and health records, part of its growing reliance on “administrative data” sources instead of traditional surveys.

Now the uproar over the banking data threatens analytical programs that help policy-makers make decisions about things like taxes, interest rates and seniors’ benefits, former officials warn.

Information from every province on cancer patients, for example, feeds a database on incidence and survival rates. The tax filings of every person and business develops census income data. And the agency is on the verge of replacing the short-form census every Canadian is required to fill out every five years by merging data from existing government holdings — a massive project years in the making.

By law, the agency can ask for any information it wants from any source. During a briefing with reporters last month, senior officials said they planned to test the limits of the Statistics Act to tap new sources of information as survey response rates decline.

Three senior officials — one overseeing information technology, a second in charge of labour, education and income statistics, and a third in charge of income statistics — defended the agency anew on Thursday during an online chat about the latest financial projects, outlined in privacy assessments posted to the Statistics Canada website, trying to articulate why the data was needed.

One participant lamented that the lack of a clear explanation fuelled public skepticism about the project: “If you want to collect this data just so that you can ‘play’ with it and see where it might be applied, then you should just say so and be honest about it.”

The Liberals stood behind the agency under questioning from the Conservatives in the House of Commons, where allegations of state surveillance and authoritarian rule peppered the debate.

The agency did not respond to interview requests.

Former officials at the agency describe a culture where safeguarding data is drilled into every worker. Identifying information is separated out of files to protect privacy, and only a small group of analysts are able to access the data when it is needed to merge various data sets. But that might not be enough.

“Any record linkage is a de facto invasion of privacy,” said Michael Wolfson, a former assistant chief statistician who left the agency in 2009.