How Ottawa’s war on data threatens all that we know about Canada

Good in-depth long read by Anne Kingston in Macleans on the Government’s reductions in data collection and dissemination (beyond the cancellation of long-form Census data).

Likely that the transition books being prepared by StatsCan include an option for reintroducing the long-form Census in the event of a change of government):

Disappearing data is only one part of a larger narrative of a degradation of knowledge—one that extends from federal scientists being prevented from talking about their research on topics as mundane as snow to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission being forced to take the federal government to court to obtain documents that should have been available under Access to Information. The situation has descended into farce: Library and Archives Canada (LAC), entrusted with preserving historic papers, books, photographs, paintings, film and artifacts, was so eroded by cuts that, a few years ago, author Jane Urquhart was unable to access her own papers, donated to LAC in the 1990s.

The result is a crisis in what Canadians know—and are allowed to know—about themselves. The threat this poses to a functioning democracy has been raised over the past several years, most recently, in the massive, damning June 2015 report “Dismantling democracy: Stifling debate and dissent in Canada”produced by Voices-Voix, a non-partisan coalition of more than 200 organizations and 5,000 individuals.

Less discussed, however, is how data erasure also threatens the economy, industry, the arts, and the country’s ability to compete internationally. The 2013 report “Information management in the Canadian federal government” is a title not likely to attract the non-librarian reader. But the conclusions drawn by its authors, a librarian at Carleton University and an information-management consultant, are chilling. Isla Jordan and Ulla de Stricker describe a country “without access to large parts of its institutional memory, and leaders without access to the information needed for strategic decision-making.” Toni Samek, a professor at the school of library and information studies at the University of Alberta, puts it more succinctly. Canada is facing a “national amnesia,” she says, a condition that will block its ability to keep government accountable, remember its past and plan its future.

Canada’s closed-data stance is taking root at the very moment “open data” and “knowledge economy” are global mantras. The OECD and World Bank have led the charge for open-platform disclosures. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched openFDA to provide easy public access. Last year, the U.S. Federal Reserve posted full and revealing transcripts of meetings held by then chairman Ben Bernanke in the weeks and months leading to the 2008 recession—there for anyone with an Internet connection to read. U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget calls for an emphasis on making data “legally and practically” more accessible.

Canada certainly talks the talk. Last year, Tony Clement, Conservative MP and Treasury Board president, announced the Action Plan on Open Government 2014-16 to “foster greater openness and accountability . . . and, at the same time, create a more cost-effective, efficient and responsive government.” Rona Ambrose, the minister of health, announced a Transparency and Openness Framework that included a commitment to begin “transparently publishing drug safety reviews.”

Those dependent on these data balk at such claims. “Health Canada has improved its transparency in a few small areas, but overall, does an abysmal job,” says Joel Lexchin, a drug-industry watchdog and professor in the school of health policy and management at Toronto’s York University. “[It] doesn’t even make public a list of drugs withdrawn for safety reasons,” he says.

Access to federal scientific data is equally dire. Canada is in the Dark Ages, compared with the U.S., says biologist Jeremy Kerr, a professor at the University of Ottawa. Kerr works in climate change, ecology and conservation—“data-hungry fields,” he says. “I do big-picture ecology, where we think across countries and continents. But rapid scientific process stops at the Canadian border.” Detailed information about Canada isn’t available, says Kerr, noting that his American colleagues “make this data freely available.” Part of the problem is long-standing, he says, arising from “the difficult nature of federal-provincial relationships.” But “accessibility of data in Canada is becoming less, not more,” he says. “We are not collecting a lot of data that used to be routine.”

Canada not only lags other governments, but also international business, says Jan Kestle, founder and president of Toronto-based Environics Analytics: “Everyone is moving toward setting up data-governance processes inside companies to collect information and safeguard it,” she says.

But where digitization has helped other governments and companies make more information available, it is having the opposite effect here. The edict to eliminate information deemed “redundant, outdated and trivial” (known as “ROT”) gives federal managers licence to decide what data should be cut and what kept, says Li, the U of T librarian. “There is no transparency, oversight, or published criteria for the decision-making process,” she says. While the U.S. Federal Depository Library Program tracks U.S. government-publication digitization efforts, Canada has no such mechanism. It’s LAC’s mandate to preserve federal government information, but there has not been a comprehensive web crawl since November 2008….

Economic considerations are cited routinely to justify cutbacks in collecting, analyzing and digitizing information. A closer look at recent data erasure, however, suggests it runs counter to sound economic strategy. The glaring example is the elimination of the mandatory long-form census, a detailed survey of Canadians taken every five years. Its replacement, the voluntary National Household Survey, added $22 million to the cost of the 2011 census; the response rate dropped from 94 per cent in 2006 to 69 per cent, which makes the data totally unreliable. “A response rate of 75 per cent is the minimum required for sample accuracy,” says StatsCan’s former chief statistician, Munir Sheikh, who famously resigned in 2010 after Tony Clement, then industry minister, stated publicly that the decision to cut the long-form census came from within StatsCan. “The federal government misrepresented my advice,” Sheikh told Maclean’s, adding that ongoing cuts to the agency have undermined its credibility. StatsCan stands by the data: “The results for the 2011 census are of very high quality, as in previous censuses,” says Peter Frayne of StatsCan.

Five years later, we are seeing the effects. Without the baseline provided by the long-form census, says statistician Doug Elliott, who runs Regina consultancy QED Information Systems, “when an employment rate or CPI [consumer price index] doesn’t make any sense, your immediate suspicion now is that the number is wrong, rather than trying to figure out why.” Voluntary surveys also create biased data, says Sheikh: Response rates from the very rich, the very poor, rural areas, immigrants and Aboriginal communities tend to be far lower—so these groups are not well-represented. “People who do not respond well to a voluntary survey are the very people social policy tries to help,” he says. “So if you were to base policy on data received, you’d say, ‘Gee, we don’t have a poverty problem in this country.’ ”

“You see this continual silencing of people who are not ‘winners,’ for lack of a better word,” says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The result is that the government can pretend they’re not there. It’s like, ‘If you’ve got any needs, we can’t hear you, we can’t see you, la la la.’”

Sheikh believes we’d be better off with no census data than what we have now: “Then you do the best you can using reasoning, logic, and whatever other stats may be available [on which] to base your decision. But when you have wrong information, chances are, it will put you on the wrong path to policy development.”

Source: How Ottawa’s war on data threatens all that we know about Canada