Data gaps harm federal response, study asserts
Authors say COVID laid bare inefficiencies
OTTAWA • While the provinces were trying to get a grasp of the mortality rate of the COVID-19 virus spreading throughout the country in the spring, federal officials were hitting a data wall.
In fact it could take months “and sometimes longer” for basic information, such as that contained in a death certificate, to make its way into national databases tracking COVID-19- related deaths, concludes the first annual report by the Canadian Statistics Advisory Council.
“Critical data gaps and a lack of coordinated data in Canada seriously undermine the ability of decision-makers and governments at all levels, as well as the general public, to understand and address key social, health, economic, environmental and energy issues facing Canadians,” the authors remark.
The council was put in place in 2017 by the Trudeau government to provide independent advice on how to improve and ensure the quality of Canada’s national statistics system.
Published Tuesday, CSAC’S first report lauds the “innovative” work done by Statistics Canada. But it also lay out the great need for Canada to finally tackle the large amount of “data gaps” — sectors in which there is little to no data collected, or data that is collected infrequently or in a non- standardized way — that are, quite literally, preventing government from making informed decisions.
Though they exist in many sectors, the systemic lack of national, high quality and comprehensive data has become particularly apparent during the pandemic in two particular areas: health care and data by race and Indigenous peoples.
“These data gaps and inconsistencies have led to serious shortcomings in the timeliness, completeness and quality of Canadian health care and health outcome data,” the report laments, noting the example of the death certificates that were slow to arrive into national statistics databases.
Environics Analytics president and council member Jan Kestle also noted that some health agencies still rely on fax machines instead of digital tools to communicate crucial information.
Situations like that, the report notes, have “greatly impaired the ability of governments at all levels to monitor and assess the evolution of the pandemic, let alone address serious health issues in Canada.”
The situation is worse when it comes to determining the impact of the COVID- 19 pandemic on racialized groups, notable Black Canadians and Indigenous communities, because the data is simply not available, the authors said.
To address these issues and more, the council recommends that the federal government create a national data strategy.
That would notably force the federal government to add statistical data requirements when planning future programs, ensure more coordination and data sharing between government organizations at all levels, and guarantee more stable funding for Statistics Canada.
Without such a strategy, “bureaucratic inertia and other hindrances to collecting and sharing statistical information across jurisdictions will continue to outweigh efforts to develop needed nationwide data accessible to all Canadians,” the council warned.
The report also highlights that some provinces refuse, or at least display a “strong reticence,” to share their health- care data with other organizations simply because officials “do not feel that their programs should be subject to scrutiny outside their jurisdiction.”
“This has contributed in part to the poor state of national health data, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors noted, without naming any specific governments.
A national data strategy would help fix that, Kestle said. But she also thinks Statistics Canada needs to better communicate to Canadians and government authorities how it protects their data and their privacy.
This was highlighted by a recent controversy in which the agency had to backtrack from an attempt to collect anonymous banking data from certain Canadians after a public outcry, despite the fact that the program respected both federal privacy laws and the strict Statistics Act.
“There needs to be more public communication around the use and the importance of statistics. But I think that most Canadians do realize that you need data to run a government and run a society,” she said.
The report was submitted to Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains, who said that his office would be reviewing the recommendations.
“We will continue to stand up for evidence- based decision- making and strike the right balance between the potential of a data- driven economy and the privacy of Canadians,” the minister’s spokesman, John Power, wrote in a statement.