REPRIEVE FOR ACCESS TO STATS
Quebec’s finance minister did the right thing on Wednesday when he stepped in to save a popular statistical database that had been set to vanish as of Aug. 19. Carlos Leitão likely knew that this week’s decision from the Institut de la statistique du Québec to do away with the Banque de données des statistiques officielles — an aggregator for vital statistics collected by various provincial departments and agencies — would reflect poorly on his government. The Liberals (and previous governments) have promised repeatedly to be more open and transparent, and the loss of this tool due to budget cuts would have represented a major step backward.
Leitão has pledged to somehow keep the database up and running, but he noted that the Institut will still need to cut back on spending in other ways.
The database would be sorely missed if it were lost. It currently represents a one-stopshop for journalists, business owners, thinktanks, research groups, public servants and curious members of the public. If you want to know, for instance, the precise number of people who immigrated to Quebec in 1987, it takes about five clicks of a mouse to find the answer. If the aggregator were no longer available, finding that same information would require digging through individual department websites. Even then, departments might not have the resources to organize and post the numbers in a timely manner, meaning that people would need to start making phone calls (drawing on government resources) or heading to a library.
The elimination of the federal long-form census in 2010 has already resulted in a growing number of statistical blind-spots that compromise Ottawa’s ability to make informed policy decisions. The elimination of the Quebec database wouldn’t be quite so problematic since, according to the Institut, the statistics it contains would continue to be gathered. But any new barriers to access could still lead to an increased reliance on incomplete data-sets. Researchers, government staffers and even foreign investors might no longer have all the information they need to draw conclusions or decide on appropriate courses of action.
The possibility of losing this tool is doubly distressing at a time when cities and provinces across Canada are striving to make public data more available to citizens online. Quebec’s provincial government, which has a long history of secrecy, has promised to encourage “greater transparency, citizen participation and collaboration between governmental actors.”
The creation in 2012 of a centralized website where data-sets are available in easy-toread formats was a step in the right direction. To then force the elimination of the Institut’s user-friendly database through cutbacks would make little sense.
As it stands, there are a few ways in which the database can be salvaged and protected over the long term. The first and best option is for the province to come up with the comparatively meagre $1 million per year to continue funding it, without requiring the Institut to slice other important elements in its budget. Even in a time of austerity, this type of resource should not have found itself on the chopping block.
The Institut could also begin charging a fee for access, but this is a less appealing solution as it places the financial burden on the user, and the Institut’s mission statement clearly notes that it has the responsibility to provide services “with a view to developing knowledge, democratizing statistics and facilitating access to data.”
To simply let the database die is unacceptable, and thankfully, the finance minister seems to recognize this. If the provincial government is truly serious about flinging open its doors to the public, the last thing it should be doing is slamming shut one of the most popular portals.