Industry Committee on Nov. 7th, 2018

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

I'll give them to you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Great.

We're going to move to Mr. Sheehan.

You have exactly seven minutes.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the chief statistician and staff for appearing before this committee.

We had unanimous consent to ask you to come here to answer some questions. We appreciate your appearing on short notice.

My question is around your engagement to date with the financial institutions. Could you please delve into that a bit more for us?

[Anil Arora]

We started working with the Canadian Bankers Association early this year, around January or February. As I said in my opening remarks, we've had about a dozen interactions with them, either in person or on the phone. We've shared with them why we need it. We've also shared with them the design of the project as we've had input from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. They've asked about the authorities. They've asked about the privacy concerns and so on. We've certainly tried to answer all their questions, and we continue, as I said, to work with them on the design of this project.

The design I just laid out, the separating of the files and bringing them in, etc., is something that's very clearly shared with them. As I said, we met with them and their members in person in June and August and laid out where we are. Based on the last meeting we had with them, their advice was that this is now the time to move from understanding the purpose and the design to now going deeper with each of the institutions. It's now time to get at what the unique system needs and what the unique file formats are, and so on. They provided us with the contacts of the relevant people in the individual institutions, and they asked us to spell out very clearly the authorities under which we would operate.

Like any other provider of information, we work with them. We make sure we understand their concerns and their clients' concerns, and we make sure these are addressed so there isn't a negative impact on their clients. That's just the way we operate, and it's no different from how we operate with all our providers.

As those financial institutions work with us to tell us about their specific needs and the concerns of their clients, maybe there will be some design elements that we will have to include that are unique to their systems, but we will never, never, never compromise the privacy or the confidentiality of the individual transactions we'll get access to.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

In your engagement with these financial institutions was there any discussion of informing their clients about your pilot project?

[Anil Arora]

Yes, absolutely. In August, we made it very clear to them. We asked them to ensure that as we roll out this project, informing their clients will be an important element. We asked them to let their clients know that Statistics Canada may—because we're talking about a sample of one in 40 clients—look at their data. We let them know that yes, this is a legitimate purpose, and we told them what it will be used for and how it's to be communicated to their clients.

They have their own systems. They have their own consent, etc., that they do. That's the kind of work we still have to do, and we were fully intending on elaborating a public communications and a rollout plan. That's where we are today.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to share some time with Majid as well.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, sir, for coming here and sharing your insight into the pilot project. Let me ask a couple of questions.

Can you tell me the benefit that you are trying to get from this pilot project? I'd like you to expand on that one and really get into what the scope of the pilot project is. I understand the stakeholders and I understand some of the demographics, but what were you trying to achieve by initiating this pilot project? What is the benefit you are going to give us?

[Anil Arora]

There are numerous benefits.

First of all, as I said, the quality of the data that's coming from our traditional methods is not meeting the needs of—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Can you give us an example?

[Anil Arora]

Let me talk about seniors, for example. Let me, then, talk about a business person who wants to expand their business or even just somebody who's between two jobs—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Seniors' pension would be an excellent example.

[Anil Arora]

The amount that a person receives as part of their old age benefit, their pension, etc., and whether it's enough, in a sense, to keep them sustained is dependent upon the rate of inflation. It's indexed in a sense. It's then benchmarked to how much prices are either going up or not in certain categories.

The amount that individual will receive on an ongoing basis is determined by the work that we do. The better we are at benchmarking the types of services and the consumption Canadians have, the better the data are for that to be benchmarked.

It's similar, as I said, for a business. A business person who wants to expand their business wants to know the ability of that in that particular neighbourhood and what the consumption pattern is. What are they consuming? They can then decide whether it makes sense for them to expand or not or maybe go to another area to expand.

You have people who are holding multiple jobs these days. How are they procuring services? They could be participating in the gig economy. They may be an Uber driver and may be renting out their place under Airbnb, and to be able to understand what a social safety net is and what the vulnerabilities are.... These are the kinds of questions policy-makers ask of us.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Talking about vulnerabilities, I'm definitely impacted as a member of Parliament and as an individual by the increase in the interest rate.

How will your analysis be able to help me, as a consumer, be able to deal with a situation that may arise as a result of the interest rate?

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

You have about 15 seconds to answer that question.

[Anil Arora]

You'll have better data at a local level to understand the implications of, let's say, rising interest rates.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move to Mr. Lloyd.

You have five minutes.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you.

I appreciate the testimony today.

As we in this room all know, this issue's been quite a political firestorm over the past few weeks, and I just wanted to know, did you or your office coordinate in advance of this meeting today with any members of Parliament, ministers or ministerial staffers regarding your appearance at committee today?

[Anil Arora]

We, of course, have kept our minister's office in the loop on the fact that we're coming to this committee, but these remarks are my own.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

I appreciate that.

Next, some of my constituents have raised this issue: Does Statistics Canada provide aggregate data to private for-profit companies?

[Anil Arora]

First of all, most of everything that we produce in terms of aggregate statistics is done so that people can use good data rather than the alternative, and we put it on our website.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Are there instances where data has been sold to companies?

[Anil Arora]

We do, from time to time, get a request from a company, for example, that says, “Your standard table puts it this way, by this way, by this way. Really what we want to do is to have a different rendition, or we want it for a different geography, because my geography is different from your geography.”

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

But do these companies pay Statistics Canada for that data and you configure it in the way that they ask you to configure it?

[Anil Arora]

Our starting point is that we recover the cost of being able to customize that request to their needs using the aggregate data that we have. We feel the taxpayers should not be subsidizing the cost of a unique request or an individual's request, so it's a cost recovery.