Philip Cross: More turmoil at Statistics Canada (2024)

Anil Arora recently quit as chief statistician of Canada, saying “I wanted to leave the place a little bit better than I found it.” It’s far from clear he did. After many years with a pristine reputation, Statistics Canada is increasingly mired in controversy and poor leadership is a big reason why.

Chief statisticians are much more powerful than their limited public visibility might suggest. Statistics Canada’s ruling policy committee, composed of the chief and six assistant chief statisticians, functions much like former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet: after polling its members, who unanimously rejected the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln concluded: “Seven nays and one aye; the ayes have it.”

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Leaving abruptly under opaque circ*mstances is becoming a habit for chief statisticians. Wayne Smith resigned in 2016 in a petty squabble with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government over tech support, a selfless stand that drew no public or professional support. It is as likely his departure reflected a guilty conscience for having publicly defended the voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) that replaced the mandatory long-form Census in 2011.

Arora’s departure follows a pandemic hiring binge the government never authorized. Not surprisingly, it now expects Statistics Canada to downsize, which is creating understandable job insecurity among its employees.

Reckless over-spending and rapid turnover in the chief statistician position point to the ineffectiveness of the National Statistics Council, which is supposed to provide expert external oversight. One of its flaws, however, is that taxpayer interests are not represented: the group is composed mostly of academics, whose appetite for data is insatiable, never mind the cost.

Fiscal irresponsibility and poor leadership undermine the case for making Statistics Canada an independent agency. True autonomy would require absolute financial independence. But giving Statistics Canada privileged access to public funds without oversight from elected representatives would violate the principle, dating back to Magna Carta, of “no taxation without representation.”

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Absent complete financial independence, a main bulwark protecting Statistics Canada’s independence is the “nuclear option” of the chief statistician resigning if the government undermines or inappropriately interferes in its operations or reputation. This was aptly demonstrated by Munir Sheikh’s principled resignation over former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government’s assertion that the voluntary NHS would not affect census data quality. But the moral authority of a chief statistician’s resignation has been diluted by overuse.

Overspending was only one problem during Arora’s tenure. Another was substantial expansion of data-gathering on race and gender. The monthly labour force survey now produces unemployment rates for nine ethnic groups and races. Statistics Canada has embraced the woke movement’s fixation on race and gender, something I roundly criticized in a 2021 article for the online magazine C2C Journal. As Richard Hanania wrote in The Origins of Woke, “the degree of wokeness in a country and what form it takes are contingent on whether and how certain kinds of data are collected.” France simply forbids collecting data on individuals’ race, religion or ethnicity. In contrast, Arora went full-woke defending expanded race data, claiming it was justified by “real racial disparities in the challenges facing Canadians,” though such problems are better left to the public and their elected representatives.

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Chronic challenges persisted at Statistics Canada during Arora’s tenure. A 2018 initiative to use the personal banking records of 500,000 Canadians was withdrawn because of concerns about privacy. When inflation took off in 2021 heightened scrutiny of the Consumer Price Index revealed shortcomings in its measurement, including lack of coverage of the prices of suddenly popular used cars. Many analysts have complained for years that finding data on Statistics Canada’s website has become markedly more difficult, especially when compared with the ease of accessing U.S. data using tools such as the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s FRED database.

The festering issue of where to draw the line for Statistics Canada’s analysis recently resurfaced via a study that concluded Canada’s real GDP per capita was seven per cent below its trend rate of growth between 1981 and 2023. The problem, as noted by former Department of Finance senior official Claude Lavoie, is that GDP could be either below or above its trend depending on the period used to calculate long-term growth. Studies like this violate the long-standing principle that Statistics Canada concentrate on research where its unique access to data yields real value-added, rather than dabble in topics easily treated by analysts outside the organization. As Lavoie concluded, “someone in the upper echelons of Statistics Canada didn’t think things through.” Not thinking things through is symptomatic of managers preoccupied with Diversity, Equality and Identity issues and with maintaining the fiction that Statistics Canada’s policies and practices are beyond reproach.

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The appointment of long-time Statistics Canada economist André Loranger as the next chief statistician promises an end to Arora’s overreach and “pushing the boundaries” when what Statistics Canada really needed was sound leadership, not more resources. Real change at Statistics Canada requires an openness to critical voices both inside and outside the organization, especially the so far largely unheard concerns of conservatives about privacy, non-partisanship and reducing Statistics Canada’s imposition on both survey respondents and taxpayers.

Financial Post

Philip Cross was chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada.

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