StatsCan’s play for data comes at a bad time
Agency wants personalized bank information amid privacy push
Transparent data stewardship.
That was the promise the federal government made in amending the Statistics Act last December, the great awakening after the dark days of Stephen Harper.
Yet, transparency is not the first descriptor that leaps to mind as we continue to discuss Statistics Canada’s data order, delivered to the banks, to hand over the personalized financial information of half a million Canadians.
Much of the debate runs aground on the issue of whether StatsCan should be moving to modernize. Of course it should. Timelier data? Yes please.
Let’s agree that accurate, reliable, relevant and timely data is, as they say, in the public good. Many a journalist has pulled her hair out over data so outdated as to be useless, or grappled with data sets that are so vast as to be meaningless. I will note here a 2014
report out of the U.K. on the timing of preliminary quarterly GDP estimates. The U.K. then was reporting 25 days after the end of quarter. The U.S.: 30 days. Canada? Sixty days.
The world has changed in 100 years. Or, as StatsCan says on its website as it marks its centenary, “It’s been quite the statistical century!” Capturing labour and skills flows, picking apart the digital economy, slicing activity in the evergrowing services sector. How to measure inequality? How robust are the data on trade and business investment? How to carve standalone statistics from the sharing economy? Broadly, how to meet the act’s mandate to “collect, compile, analyze, abstract and publish statistical information relating to the commercial, industrial, financial, social, economic and general activities and condition of the people.” And specifically, in the current example, how to capture in a meaningful way the consumption, savings and debt patterns of Canadian households.
The problem with the storyline is the way in which the need for modernization (yes) is being promoted at the expense of privacy (no).
Existing methodologies are cumbersome and arguably slow. Consider the survey of financial security. Last December, StatsCan released the most recent data on the survey, which is designed to capture a comprehensive picture of the financial health of Canadians. The survey period: September through December 2016. So a year passes between the conclusion of data gathering and publication.
Survey subjects — slightly more than 21,000 households — were notified by letter. The survey itself was conducted by telephone and took approximately 45 minutes. Sample question: Do you have an outstanding balance on a home equity line of credit? And the obvious follow-up: What is the outstanding balance? Year over year we can see, for example, the increased use of lines of credit and the overheated pockets of the country where consumers are particularly debt-prone.
Correlating debt with financial literacy is the partial aim of the Canadian financial capability survey, which is sponsored by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada and two departments of the federal government, but carried out by StatsCan. Again, computer-assisted telephone interviewing is the method, an approach that reflects, according to the sponsors, “previous successes in other countries.” But there have only been two of these since the survey was conceived in 2009 and the snapshot results offer generic insights: 26 per cent of males report they are keeping up with their debt, but are struggling to do so.
The easy conclusion from just these two examples: existing processes are arduous, laggardly and often not very revealing.
In contrast, real-time tracking of the borrowing, spending, debt payment and lending habits of Canadians and their banks could have important policy implications. I’m thinking here of the watch on inflation, or regulatory push back on too-loose guidelines for mortgage borrowers.
However, StatsCan has yet to satisfactorily explain why its demand for data should be connected to you, by name, instead of you, Consumer X.
Curious, I zinged an email over to the Office for National Statistics in the U.K. What are the current practices for bank data sharing, I wanted to know. Here’s the response: “We don’t currently receive any non-aggregated data from banks in the U.K. Data that are provided by U.K. banks (through the Bank of England) are anonymised and aggregated before we receive it.”
How did Statistics Canada come to act so aggressively and, I would argue, surreptitiously?
Canada’s privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, is investigating. Anil Arora, the country’s chief statistician, has stated the obvious: the project is on hold until further notice.
The whole affair reflects badly on the agency. Updating the Statistics Act, which eliminated potential prison time for not responding to the mandatory census, was meant to advance us on the international stage. The promise of transparency was emphasized by the act’s direction to the chief statistician to “publish any mandatory request for information before the request is made.” The independence of the chief statistician was formalized. And Canadians are ultimately to be better informed via the Canadian Statistical Advisory Council, which is mandated to publicly issue an annual report on the state of the country’s statistical system.
Consumers generally are demanding more control over data sharing. We can look to the recently tabled draft of a new Consumer Data Protection Act in the U.S., which proposes a “do not track” opt out provision, or the transparency push in Europe via the General Data Protection Regulation. In other words, the timing of StatsCan’s personalized data play could not have been worse.