STATCAN CHANGES ITS WAYS FOR THE BETTER. CARMICHAEL.
Overhaul begins to bear fruit in speed, accuracy
Statistics Canada is planning an early Christmas present for Stephen Poloz, the Bank of Canada governor.
James Tebrake, directorgeneral of macroeconomic accounts at StatCan, said last week that it will begin publishing monthly data on exports and imports of services in December.
For most of you, this is about as exciting as finding an orange in your Christmas stocking. But for data geeks like Poloz, it’s a big deal. The governor has been urging StatCan for about two years to get him more timely trade data so he can assess whether the export recovery is as weak as it has appeared. The monthly reports on exports and imports of goods have been dispiriting, but services might be another matter. However, StatCan only publishes figures on the latter every quarter, ensuring that trade in goods owns the narrative. Timelier data could prompt changes in the central bank’s plans for interest rates.
That’s just one way StatCan indirectly influences our lives. It takes that responsibility seriously; some would say too seriously, as its desire to be as accurate as possible often results in it holding on to information past the point that it’s still useful to anyone. But that’s starting to change, along with a good many other things at Canada’s oftmaligned statistics agency, including a better effort at public relations.
Officials this month are hitting the road to host roundtables on StatCan’s place in the age of Big Data, the first “national dialogue” in the agency’s 100-year history. Journalists were invited to meet Tebrake and three of his colleagues in Ottawa last week for an audience of their own. Three showed up, and two joined via teleconference. The weak turnout was a reminder that if you spend decades shrinking from public view, you may struggle to get attention once you decide to engage. Still, Gabrielle Beaudoin, the director-general of communications, hosted a pretty good talk; no one shied away from questions and the conversation filled two hours. That’s something.
StatCan no longer can take its position for granted. Private outfits now rival — and sometimes exceed — the government’s ability to collect and process raw information. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears to want to keep pace, as he gave StatCan $41 million in the most recent budget to help the agency stay relevant. Anil Arora, the chief statistician, deserves some credit for overcoming his agency’s historic shyness in order to share how he’s spending that money. StatCan wants to shake its reputation for stodginess and get in the game.
“People want information as it becomes available,” said Daniela Ravindra, directorgeneral of the economy-wide statistics branch, which calculates the Consumer Price Index, among other things.
StatCan will rely increasingly on the reams of administrative data that companies collect and store digitally.
That’s partly out of necessity. The traditional approach to gathering information is conducting interviews with a representative sample of Canadians. Alas, we no longer have patience for in-depth interrogations, assuming we even answer the phone. “Gone is the 45-minute survey,” said Karen Mihorean, directorgeneral for social, health and labour statistics.
But the main reason for the shift is that our digital footprints provide more accurate records than anything we tell an interviewer. A reliance on administrative data should improve the quality and timeliness of StatCan’s information; in theory, once the systems are in place, the agency’s quarterly report on gross domestic product could be released almost as soon as each quarter ends, Tebrake said.
None of this is as easy as it might seem, at least according to the men and women charged with the task. It takes a lot of work to “backcast” new administrative data with old databases that were built on surveys, said Ravindra. (She hopes to speed up the process by deploying artificial intelligence.) There also are privacy concerns, and even though StatCan has the statutory authority to reach deep into our lives, it prefers to exercise restraint. Mihorean and her colleagues said they have a “close relationship” with the Privacy Commissioner, and that they prefer to extract information from companies through mutual agreement.
The result is a more creative and nimble agency, if still a step or two slower than people such as Poloz would like.
Consider Tebrake’s work on cannabis. It’s not every day a statistician gets to record the creation of a new industry. Except the pot business isn’t brand new, it already was a multibilliondollar business. So to measure the legal industry properly, Tebrake needed an estimate of the size of the black market. One of the ways he tried to create a benchmark for current demand was to test the wastewater for THC, the property of cannabis that gets you high. He hopes those tests will allow him to see whether consumption changes with legalization.
“Trying to get at the national accounts through wastewater systems; that’s not something I thought I would be doing. Ever,” said Tebrake.