Statscan can’t afford for data access to play favourites

Former Chief Statistician Wayne Smith’s critique of Shared Services Canada may have some merit as this example illustrates:

There were some curious and intriguing details behind the headlines of Statistics Canada’s monthly employment report, as there always are. It’s a serious shame – and a serious problem – that almost no one could see them.

Again.

The national statistical agency’s website was out of commission since early Friday morning, before the 8:30 a.m. ET release of the February labour force survey. As of late afternoon, Statscan’s website remained dark; the details of one of the most important economic indicators of its monthly calendar were invisible to the Canadian public all day.

(By the way, the report showed that the Canadian economy added an estimated 15,000 net new jobs in February, a bit better than economists had expected, and the unemployment rate dropped to 6.6 per cent, matching an eight-year low.)

You might recall that something like this happened before, about eight months ago, when Statscan’s systems were down for more than seven hours on another jobs-report Friday. Not to mention the many, many occasions that Statscan’s website has fizzled out for much briefer periods shortly after the release of major economic indicators, during moments of peak traffic scrambling for the fresh data.

At the time of this writing, we don’t know what the problem was with Friday’s system failure. Neither Statscan nor Shared Services Canada, the agency that oversees e-mail, data and network services across the vast breadth of the federal public service, got back to us with an explanation. Certainly past snafus have been placed at the feet of Shared Services, the $1.9-billion brainchild of the previous Conservative government that was supposed to streamline Ottawa’s complex tangle of information technology, but has instead been blamed for everything from AWOL paycheques to RCMP systems failures.

The previous head of Statscan, Wayne Smith, resigned last September over Shared Services’ handling of Statscan’s information systems, which he said had not only become “disruptive, ineffective, slow and unaffordable,” but compromised the independence and confidentiality of the statistical agency’s data.

Now, I’m not here to point fingers. But the point is that these Statscan failures, while maybe not the same risk to public safety as the RCMP’s problems, are more than just a nuisance to the economists and journalists who wallow in these economic numbers.

The system problems, when they arise, create inequitable distribution of information that is relied on, and more to the point traded on, by financial markets. That’s a serious problem.

In the case of Friday’s jobs data, instead of every market participant being able to see the same data at the same time on the same website, each was left to his or her own devices (literally and figuratively). The lucky ones had access to Bloomberg data and news terminals, the expensive yet indispensable toys of professional trading operations, where at least the basic highlights of the report would have been fairly quickly disseminated. Others could have turned to media reports from the smattering of news organizations that attended Statscan’s pre-release lockup (in which reporters were given the release in advance but kept sequestered in a room, unable to communicate the information until the moment of the release time).

But if you were in need of the deeper statistical details below the surface of these quick-hit reports, good luck. Even the research departments of the big banks were scrambling, relying on friendly contacts at Statscan to e-mail to them whatever data they could.

All of which not only delayed the dissemination of this key economic data to the public and to financial markets, but also resulted in some very uneven distribution – in terms of both the timeliness and the amount of information that reached different sets of ears and eyes with an interest in the data.

And the employment data are very significant indeed to the bond and currency markets, especially now. It has become increasingly evident that the direction the Bank of Canada will take on interest rates hinges substantially on the evolution of the labour market. In its rate decision earlier this month, the central bank pointed specifically to “subdued growth in wages and hours” as key evidence of “persistent economic slack” in Canada.

And indeed, the February jobs report showed that despite the improvements in hiring and the unemployment rate, growth in wages and hours worked remained disappointing. Knowledge of this spoke volumes to any bond or currency trader placing bets on the timing of future Bank of Canada rate moves. And some traders had access to this information long before others.

That’s simply unacceptable.

As long as these technology problems persist, they undermine the integrity of an independent, impartial national statistics provider. Access to critical data can’t play favourites, even if it’s by accident.

Source: Statscan can’t afford for data access to play favourites – The Globe and Mail

Census still vulnerable to political meddling, says former chief

More on Statistics Canada and the proposed changes to make it more independent but according to Wayne Smith, the former Chief Statistician, not fully.

Unlikely that any government would give StatsCan full independence and I remember a lively Cabinet discussion on some aspects of the 2001 Census:

The federal government’s bid to protect Statistics Canada from political interference has a significant oversight that exposes the census to the possibility of government meddling, says Canada’s former chief statistician.

Wayne Smith, who resigned abruptly from the agency in September, said newly introduced legislation doesn’t change the parts of the Statistics Act that give cabinet control over the content of the questionnaire.

That leaves the census – used by governments to plan infrastructure and services – vulnerable to the sorts of changes the Conservatives imposed in 2011 by turning the long-form census into a voluntary survey, Smith said.

“That’s a major flaw in this bill,” he said. “The government brought this bill in because of the census, but it’s failing to deal with the census.”

Smith described the bill as a first step towards broadening the agency’s authority over how information on all types of subjects is collected, analyzed and disseminated, shifting that authority away from the minister.

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains, the minister responsible for Statistics Canada, would retain the right to decide what information Statistics Canada collects, including directing the agency to collect data on emerging areas like renewable energy. The bill also gives cabinet the ability to make methodological changes, such as making mandatory surveys voluntary as the Conservatives did with the 2011 census.

Source: Census still vulnerable to political meddling, says former chief

Shared Services likely to become ‘money pit,’ says Canada’s former chief statistician who quit two weeks ago

In his words:

Canada’s former chief statistician, who publicly quit his job two weeks ago on principle to the cheers of hundreds of Statistics Canada employees, says Shared Services Canada is doomed to fail.

“There’s a really good chance Shared Services Canada will turn into a money pit,” Mr. Smith told The Hill Times after he resigned publicly as Canada’s chief statistician on Sept. 16.

Mr. Smith stepped down after fighting unsuccessfully to free Statistics Canada from Shared Services’ government IT department, which Mr. Smith said jeopardizes the number-crunching agency’s independence and integrity. As well, he said the model the government created for the government-wide IT management is doomed to fail.

…As a result of his departure, he told The Hill Times that he’s been iced-out of the deputy minister community, one he said he had never really been “in,” and, so far, said his claims have been dismissed by the government.

Mr. Smith said he thinks it’s a wrong-headed move to transfer Statistics Canada’s informatics infrastructure to Shared Services, but believes it’s the senior ranks of the bureaucracy that is pushing “extremely strongly,” in favour of the Shared Services model.

“This idea came out of the bureaucracy, the most senior bureaucracy is very committed to it, they don’t want to walk away from it. [The] Privy Council Office, Treasury Board Secretariat, and more people in the most senior ranks are strongly committed to this,” said Mr. Smith, adding that they were the ones to sell it to the current government as worth continuing.

“I think the government wants to believe it,” he said.

The $2-billion department, Shared Services, was created in 2011 by the previous Conservative government to consolidate and modernize the Government of Canada’s IT networks and personnel by 2020, a deadline it’s now uncertain about meeting, given extensive delays and potential greater costs than initially thought. Its three key tasks are to amalgamate all government email systems, merge data centres, and consolidate IT networks.

….Mr. Smith said, in principle, the job of the national statistics office is centered around information and technology, and “everything we do, from drawing samples, to collecting via the internet, to processing survey data and disseminating survey data, it absolutely requires informatics to run efficiently, and well and properly. … When the government created Shared Services Canada it took our away our authority to acquire informatics infrastructure, hardware, the servers, and the file servers we needed to do our job, and they gave that authority to SSC.”

Mr. Smith said even though he had the budget to purchase the informatics systems he wanted, the decision-making power had been taken away from him.

“Therefore they can stop me from disseminating data, from producing data, simply by withholding or failing to provide the informatics infrastructure—the computing power—to do it. And it doesn’t really matter, at the end of the day, if they do it out of malicious intent or whether they do it out of incompetence; the result is the same,” said Mr. Smith.

He said there was an “unacceptable level of risk” in its data centre infrastructure, which the two departments disagreed on where the actual drives would be located and who would have access. He said there was an inability for Shared Services to deliver the additional capacity required to move ahead with Statistics Canada’s plans to enhance its website to be more user-friendly. And he said there was, at the time he left, a “lineup” of policy departments at Statistics Canada’s door asking for new data as a result of the Liberal government’s emphasis in evidence-based decision-making.

“More money got spent, the results aren’t there, and this is simply because the decisions are outside the control of Statistics Canada now,” said Mr. Smith.

He added that although this was the state of affairs when he resigned, he’s optimistic that because of his outspoken critiques, “every effort will be made to make sure my predictions don’t come true.”

In response to the allegations last week, senior officials from Shared Services and the Treasury Board Secretariat held a technical briefing where Shared Services Canada chief Ron Parker dismissed Mr. Smith’s concerns.

Mr. Parker said that he and Mr. Smith last met at an April meeting and there were “no technical or operational issues” raised. Mr. Smith said this is utterly false.

“I was appalled … for him to contend that there was no issues is absolutely absurd,” Mr. Smith said, adding that he recalls at that meeting raising a “litany of concerns.”

Mr. Smith said he thinks the government shouldn’t go further down the enterprise-wide IT path until a business plan and accountability model have been established between Shared Services and all partner departments. He said the government should be skeptical about its ability to deliver on such a massive transformation, pointing to the Phoenix pay system debacle that’s disrupted or affected the pay for 82,000 public servants. The Phoenix pay system has cost the government more than $50-million to fix, and the $398-million Email Transformation Initiative to move all government email addresses to one your.email@canada.ca system is on hold and 18 months past when it was supposed to be fully implemented.

The complaints from Statistics Canada are not the first from a department who is unsatisfied with Shared Services work. A number of departments are unhappy about the service they’ve received and some other departments that deal with sensitive data have explored ways to opt out of the system. So far, Mr. Parker says the plans do not include any departments opting out of the agreement.

Despite this, Mr. Parker declared the benefits of the enterprise approach remain clear, and “the partners are part of that model and therefore there’s nothing, nothing in the plan that envisions opting-out.”

….The decision to resign came after months of trying to bring attention to his concerns, said Mr. Smith, who has been raising issues since before the current government was elected and after, in meetings with the minister responsible for Statistics Canada, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains (Mississauga-Malton, Ont.), and Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick.

He thought the government’s promise to enhance his agency’s independence would bring sea change to fix his problems with Shared Services. When it didn’t and the issues with Shared Services Canada began to dominate conversations with employees who were saying it affected their ability to do their job, he decided he needed to make it clear he was prepared to resign. After that didn’t move the needle, he submitted his resignation letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) on Aug. 3, enough time he thought for them to implement an independent appointment process for his successor. That didn’t happen and instead the government appointed Anil Arora, who was working as an assistant deputy minister at Health Canada.

“When I penned that letter I thought that the odds were overwhelmingly against it having any impact other than me winding up resigned, and my interpretation of the situation was correct,” said Mr. Smith, who didn’t hear anything from anyone in government from the point of submitting his resignation until Sept. 15, when letters came from both Mr. Wernick and Mr. Trudeau, accepting his resignation.

After the way government has handled his resignation, he thinks Canadians should be skeptical about their commitments to Statistics Canada.

While he doesn’t see himself as a whistleblower, since resigning he said he’s received a lot of encouragement from employees at the agency, who have sent him emails supporting his move and thanking him for standing up. He’s received support from the national statistics council, from provincial and territorial counterparts, and international support.

“Everybody sees the issue, and they’re all living the consequences,” Mr. Smith said.

Source: Shared Services likely to become ‘money pit,’ says Canada’s former chief statistician who quit two weeks ago – The Hill Times – The Hill Times