Cancer survivors income falls $5K a year, StatsCan finds

2014/10/02 Leave a comment

Not surprising, and mirrors my experience, although I benefitted from good government employee benefits that helped those with catastrophic illness (the government planning to roll these back).

While in the end, my particularly aggressive form of cancer made returning to work a non-starter, most people following cancer diagnosis and treatment of any kind also tend to shift their priorities towards family and friends, with career advancement becoming secondary.

While I wouldn’t go so far as the Canadian Cancer Society – we often make choices between income and other priorities – there is need to examine whether we have the right balance between benefits for those with catastrophic illness and the overall cost to governments and employers:

On average, cancer survivors earned $5,079, or 12.1 per cent, less one year after diagnosis than their counterparts who were never diagnosed with the disease. Cancer lowered the probability of working in the first year after diagnosis by three percentage points on average compared with the other group in the sample.

The effects continued but lessened in the second and third years after diagnosis.

Employees may work fewer hours after cancer treatment as they recover. Others may switch jobs to something less stressful and perhaps lower paying.

“We find cancer patients are forced into situations where they have to choose between their treatment or their income, and thats not acceptable,” said Lauren Dobson-Hughes of the Canadian Cancer Society.

The society would like to see an increase in sickness benefits beyond 15 weeks and an increase in the amount thats provided beyond 55 per cent of salary. Theres also currently a two-week waiting period for EI, which Dobson-Hughes said isnt sustainable for many patients.

Cancer survivors income falls $5K a year, StatsCan finds – Health – CBC News.

Filed under Other, Public Policy Tagged with , ,

Could Alberta pass Quebec to become the second-largest province? – Macleans.ca

2014/09/19 Leave a comment

From the latest Statistics Canada population projections for the next 25 years:

The Atlantic provinces aren’t likely to fare well. The population in Newfoundland is likely to drop over the next 25 years. P.E.I. should continue to grow, but most of the growth scenarios StatsCan ran on New Brunswick and Nova Scotia showed the provinces shrinking by 2038.

Under every growth scenario, Ontario will remain the country’s largest province, driven largely by immigration.

Quebec’s population would grow over the next 25 years under all the scenarios, with most of the gains coming from immigration, but because its rate of growth is almost certain to come in lower than the Canadian average, its demographic weight, or share of the total Canadian population, will slide.

Under most scenarios, Alberta’s population will surpass that of British Columbia by 2038. It’ll be the youngest population, too, with the lowest proportion of seniors in the country.

Jason Kirby’s unscientific projections show Alberta’s population possibly becoming larger than Quebec’s some time in the early 2050s.

Economically, this shift will happen sooner:

But population growth is one thing. When people talk about provincial rankings, there’s a good chance they’re referring to the size of their economies, as opposed to how many folks live where. It’s certainly the metric any politician boasts about first, come election time. So, to take our Quebec-Alberta match to the next level, here’s another look into the future, this time using 10-year GDP growth rates. Will Alberta’s economy overtake that of Quebec? Barring some pretty massive changes in provincial fates, that could happen as early as 2016, some three decades before Alberta’s population ever catches up to Quebec’s—which pretty much says everything you need to know about how grim the economy is in la belle province.

Could Alberta pass Quebec to become the second-largest province? – Macleans.ca.

Filed under Government, Immigration Tagged with , ,

Statistics Canada rewrote our story on Statistics Canada – Macleans.ca

2014/09/04 1 Comment

This is quite funny, but not for the lack of judgement it showed in trying to “correct” the spin of a story. Worth reading as most points are editorial rather than substantive in nature.

A short letter to the editor focussing on substance would have been more effective:

Problems like these are pretty common in big organizations, where it’s not unheard of for IT departments to start updating computer systems without telling anyone for updates to systems to be made without a full understanding of their impact and for senior managers to have no idea how their computer systems work, causing mass panic and confusion.

Statistics Canada rewrote our story on Statistics Canada – Macleans.ca.

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StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen

2014/09/02 Leave a comment

Makes sense, in terms of efficiency and potentially accuracy (i.e., income data from tax forms may be more reliable than self-reporting).

Ironically, given that it is essentially a “big data” approach, it could be more intrusive than the former mandatory census that the Government abolished citing its intrusiveness (and not mentioning less than a handful of complaints).

Information sharing and privacy will be the harder policy issues.

But good that this is being considered:

A virtual census relies heavily on administrative data: giant caches of information collected by government in the regular course of business.

Statistics Canada already uses 500 databases drawn from federal, provincial and municipal governments, and the private sector. Among many other things, those data files provide information on individual incomes taxes, corporate taxes, payroll deductions, employment insurance, building permits, births and deaths, even telephone bills.

A handful of European countries — Finland, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany — have scrapped their survey-based censuses in favour of population counts that rely heavily on an amalgam of administrative data. Sometimes, that data is combined with information from sample surveys.

“If you look around the world, particularly in Europe, you’ll see many countries have moved away from going out with a survey the way we do,” Smith told the Citizen.

“They’ve said there are data files available that we can use to effectively count the population: we don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and bother every household in the country to count the population.”

StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen.

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How StatsCan lost 42,000 jobs with the stroke of a key – Macleans.ca

2014/08/30 Leave a comment

Ouch. More a management than a technical issue, in terms of the lack of communication and risk analysis. And possibly partially a result of reduced capacity on the management and quality control side as a result of reduced funding:

Fast forward to July. StatsCan technicians were updating the Labour Force Survey computer systems. They were changing a field in the survey’s vast collection of databases called the “dwelling identification number.” The report doesn’t explain what this is, but it’s likely a unique code assigned to each of the 56,000 households in the survey so that analysts can easily track their answers over time. They assumed they only needed to make this change to some of the computer programs that crunch the employment data, but not all of them.

The changes themselves were happening piecemeal, rather than all at once, because the system that collects and analyzes the labour force survey is big, complicated and old it was first developed in 1997. Despite being a pretty major overhaul of the computer system, the report makes it clear that the agency considered the changes to be nothing but minor routine maintenance. After updating the system, no one bothered to test the changes to see if they had worked properly before the agency decided to release the data to the public, in large part because they considered it too minor to need testing.

One of the programs that was supposed to be updated — but wasn’t — was the program that fills in the blanks when people don’t answer all the survey questions. But since technicians had changed the identification code for households in some parts of the system, but not others, the program couldn’t match all the people in July survey to all the people in the June survey. The result was that instead of using the June survey results to update the July answers, all those households who didn’t answer the questions about being employed in July were essentially labelled as not in the labour force. With the push of a button, nearly 42,000 jobs disappeared.

… There is a particularly illuminating passage in the report that speaks to problems of miscommunication and misunderstanding at the agency:

“Based on the facts that we have gathered, we conclude that several factors contributed to the error in the July 2014 LFS results. There was an incomplete understanding of the LFS processing system on the part of the team implementing and testing the change to the TABS file. This change was perceived as systems maintenance and the oversight and governance were not commensurate with the potential risk. The systems documentation was out of date, inaccurate and erroneously supported the team’s assumptions about the system. The testing conducted was not sufficiently comprehensive and operations diagnostics to catch this type of error were not present. As well, roles and responsibilities within the team were not as clearly defined as they should have been. Communications among the team, labour analysts and senior management around this particular issue were inadequate.”

How StatsCan lost 42,000 jobs with the stroke of a key – Macleans.ca.

Filed under Data Tagged with ,

Despite funding boost, Statistics Canada jobs-data upgrade will take time – The Globe and Mail

2014/08/29 Leave a comment

Looks like some long-standing issues between the employer and household surveys. Not surprising that it will take time to build capacity to improve labour market information, but at least there is additional funding and acknowledgment of the need for better information to improve private and public policy:

Officials at Canada’s statistics agency are planning how to spend an additional $14-million a year that the Conservative government announced in June to fund two large new employer surveys.

That announcement followed months of criticism that the government was making policy decisions on everything from training to immigration without reliable job vacancy statistics. Since then, Statscan’s two existing labour market surveys have come under closer scrutiny and criticism.

The agency told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday the new money won’t have any immediate impact on those existing surveys, but Statscan isn’t ruling out changes down the road.

The agency is expected to release a report soon that will explain what led it to make the unprecedented decision this month of pulling its flagship jobs report, a survey of households called the Labour Force Survey, after the discovery of an error in its July numbers.

Despite funding boost, Statistics Canada jobs-data upgrade will take time – The Globe and Mail.

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Don’t beat up Statscan for one data error – Cross

2014/08/18 Leave a comment

More on StatsCan from Phillip Cross, former chief economic analyst. Worth reading for some of the history and how the agency reacted to previous cuts:

People should get agitated about Statscan over substantive issues. Wring your hands that the CPI over-states price changes over long periods. Write your MP complaining that the Labour Force Survey doesn’t follow the U.S. practice and exclude 15 year olds. Take to the barricades that for an energy superpower like Canada, measuring energy exports has become a monthly adventure, routinely revised by $1-billion a month. But don’t use the July employment incident to evaluate how the statistical system is functioning overall. They messed up one data point in one series. Big deal. Anyone who lets one data point affect their view of the economy should not be doing analysis. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

Don’t beat up Statscan for one data error – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Data Tagged with ,

The case of the disappearing Statistics Canada data

2014/08/15 Leave a comment

Good piece on Statistics Canada and the impact of some of the changes made to reduce long-standing data series:

Last year, Stephen Gordon railed against StatsCan’s attention deficit disorder, and its habit of arbitrarily terminating long-standing series and replacing them with new data that are not easily comparable.

For what appears to be no reason whatsover, StatsCan has taken a data table that went back to 1991 and split it up into two tables that span 1991-2001 and 2001-present. Even worse, the older data have been tossed into the vast and rapidly expanding swamp of terminated data tables that threatens to swallow the entire CANSIM site. A few months ago, someone looking for SEPH wage data would get the whole series. Now, you’ll get data going back to 2001 and have to already know StatsCan won’t tell you that there are older data hidden behind the “Beware of the Leopard” sign.…

Statistics Canada must be the only statistical agency in the world where the average length of a data series gets shorter with the passage of time. Its habit of killing off time series, replacing them with new, “improved” definitions and not revising the old numbers is a continual source of frustration to Canadian macroeconomists.

Others are keeping tabs on the vanishing data. The Canadian Social Research Newsletter for March 2 referred to the cuts as the CANSIM Crash Diet and tallied some of the terminations:

  • For the category “Aboriginal peoples” : 4 tables terminated out of a total of 7
  • For the category “Children and youth” : 89 tables terminated out of a total of 130
  • For the category “Families, households and housing” : 67 tables terminated out of a total of 112
  • For the category “Government” : 62 tables terminated out of a total of 141
  • For the category “Income, pensions, spending and wealth” : 41 tables terminated out of a total of 167
  • For the category “Seniors” : 13 tables terminated out of a total of 30

As far as Statistics Canada’s troubles go, this will never get the same level of attention as the mystery of the 200 jobs. But, as it relates to the long-term reliability of Canadian data, it’s just as serious.

Given my work using NHS data, particularly ethnic origin, visible minority and religions, linked to social and economic outcomes, still in the exploration stage of what data and linkages are available – or not.

The case of the disappearing Statistics Canada data

Filed under Data, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Statistics Canada rushing to redo July job numbers

2014/08/14 Leave a comment

More bad news re StatsCan regarding its having to redo job numbers:

The incident will add fuel to a continuing debate over the quality of the federal government’s labour market data, which, economists contend, has generally been more volatile in recent years.

Peter Buchanan, senior economist with CIBC World Markets, said the error reinforces the fact that markets and policy makers need reliable information.

“Obviously, this does add to concerns on that front,” he said. “Good data is essential to steer the economic ship in the right direction.”

Federal departments – including Finance Canada – have recently used alternative private sector surveys based on Internet job postings to produce job vacancy statistics. That approach led to criticism after the Parliamentary Budget Officer pointed out that the government’s claim of rising job vacancies was almost entirely due to methodological problems associated with using job postings on the classified site Kijiji.

Partly as a response to that criticism, the government announced in June that it would give Statistics Canada an additional $14-million a year starting next year to produce a new job vacancy survey and a new survey on wages.

One of my doctors commented, regarding the cancellation of the Census, that  “there is nothing more costly than ignorance.” The government is paying the price for not having valued good quality data and statistics.

Statistics Canada rushing to redo July job numbers – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Chart of the Day: Hate crimes – Five-Year Trends

2014/07/14 1 Comment

Source: StatsCan Police-reported hate crimes in Canada (2008-12)

Source: StatsCan Police-reported hate crimes in Canada (2008-12)

Thanks to New Canadian Media, the Statscan 2012 hate crimes report is getting some attention (reporting Share News):

There were 82 more hate crime incidents in Canada in 2012 than in 2011. Some of the increase is partly due to improvements in reporting by some police services.

The study lists Hamilton, Thunder Bay and Peterborough as having the highest incidents of hate crime in Canada.

And the majority, or 82 per cent of hate crimes, occurred in major cities with Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver leading the way.

Of the hate crimes reported and examined, 75 per cent had been confirmed by police as hate-motivated; and the remaining 25 per cent were recorded as suspected, Statistics Canada said.

Looking at the report, and comparing with the previous four years, some observations:

  • the overall level of hate crimes is remarkably stable (about 1,400 per year);
  • mischief continues to be the most common hate crime;
  • race and ethnicity continue to account for around 50 %;
  • black victims consistently account for about 40 %;
  • Jewish victims range from 53 to 71%, with no trend line ;
  • Muslim victims range between 9 and 15%, similarly with no trend line; and,
  • while victims of hate crimes, save for sexual orientation, are relatively distributed in terms of age, those accused of hate crimes are overwhelmingly young. In both cases, males are predominant.

Some of the disparities in reporting rates (these are police reported hate crimes) reflects the comfort different communities have in reporting to the police.

Muslim hate crimes are likely relatively under-reported given the newness of the community to Canada and likely trust issues with the police.

In contrast,  Canadian Jews are more well established and comfortable reporting to the police, in part given the work of B’nai Brith.

Hate crimes increasing against Blacks and Jews – StatsCan | Share News.

Direct link to the StatsCan report (worth reading):

Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2012

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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