Industry Committee on April 11th, 2017

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Ms. Eichler.

[Dr. Margrit Eichler]

Neither do I.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Schreyer, do you have any other comment on that?

Mr. Schreyer, Bill C-36 could make the census of the population mandatory but grant the Governor in Council the exclusive authority to determine the census questions. I am wondering how other countries with a population census similar to ours at StatsCan determine what the census questions are going to be.

[Paul Schreyer]

A country's executive lays out the basic information that it wants to have, but the specific formulation that is used in the census or the specific method that is employed to obtain that information is typically left to the statistics office.

In many countries, you do have a ministerial conclusion that a particular survey or census should be conducted at a particular moment, typically because you need budgetary resources to do so. The technicalities of how it's being put in place and how questions are being formulated is typically something that is left to statisticians.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Thank you.

I have the policy paper by the OECD council on good statistical practices, which I'm referring to. One of the parts of this is a commitment to the quality of statistical outputs and processes, dealing with timeliness, punctuality, relevance, accuracy, credibility, coherence, and comparability. It's analyzing data over time and trends, while of course making sure that people can then relate to it. I think the critical part, as we look to the future, of all data analysis is to make sure that it's in a machine-readable form and it's open data, so that people can take a look at it.

It becomes a way for individuals to be able to mine the data and use it in ways that we haven't even imagined yet. I think that's the critical part. Sometimes we just think that what we have is an obtrusive kind of form. As a farmer and a teacher, I know that when the form comes out on May 10 and someone is right in the middle of working 30 days of 20-hours each, it's difficult to have the time to complete that mandatory long-form ag census to grab all of that data. But it's more a case of once you have it, what can we do with it? Who has the ability to go in and purchase the data if they need to and disseminate reports from it?

I'm just wondering. The report talks about ensuring that there's “user-friendly data access and dissemination”, and that's a critical component of it. The final part says, “this also entails a commitment to respond to major misinterpretations of data by users.” I refer back to when, during the recent elections, we had something called “vote compass”, and our national broadcaster decided this would be a good thing to help people decide what their thoughts were or where they would be. I still have people in therapy from when they found out they were Liberals.

Anybody can use statistics for their own purposes, and I think it's critical that we look at it.

I'm just wondering if you could, in the short time that is remaining—or the zero time that is remaining—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

I'd just like to thank you for being here and giving us your expertise. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Masse, you have seven minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to conclude as well, with a few comments here. I think the rest of the decision-making becomes a political process for the most part, but I do want to highlight a couple of things that are important for our guest to understand and also with regard to where the government goes.

We see that in the House of Commons the government has decided to move closure on Bill C-25 while accepting only one amendment from all the testimony we heard at this committee on, basically, an amendment that was suggested in the original debate that I'd proposed in the House of Commons to at least have a review of that. The rest of the decision-making process will involve political decisions about this.

It's interesting, and I thank the researchers for coming back with regard to a question I had on Shared Services Canada and the bonuses that had been received there and the processes involved. We do have a serious problem here, though, that we have to solve with regard to our census in terms of privacy, to enshrine the independence of Statistics Canada and to protect its integrity at a time when we have formed, with Shared Services, a bureaucratic government agency that's unheralded in Canadian history in terms of its information-gathering component. I don't think we want to undermine the significance of that project that was created, but it is vulnerable to privacy breaches.

I'd point to the privacy breaches that we've all seen in the past. Some of them can be quite dramatic but comical in a sense. We have private industry, companies like Ashley Madison, which has had privacy breaches affecting people. At J.P. Morgan, there was a breach involving banking records. I am a Sony PlayStation player, and we've had a breach there as well. Finally, when shopping on eBay and other sites, privacy has been the most important aspect for consumers, but has often been the least protected. Hence, we have our Privacy Commissioner in Canada to oversee some of these things.

I'll conclude by saying that I think that, obviously, our decision-making and our integrity protection are going to be the most important things for our stats and for setting a model for the world. I found some of the most interesting testimony here today the point that most countries do not outsource their information. One of the things that got me involved in my early career here in Ottawa was the outsourcing of Stats Canada information to Lockheed Martin. There were, obviously privacy issues involved, but also ethical issues. I disagreed with the government's outsourcing of that. In fact, it cost Canadian taxpayers more money to do that, because what we exposed was the fact that it was susceptible to U.S. legislation under the Patriot Act. Moreover, we found out in-house, after the contract was rewarded to Lockheed Martin, that it cost Canadian taxpayers millions more dollars to alter that contract to keep the data here. The so-called outsourcing or privatization of the information to a third party actually cost Canadian taxpayers more.

I want to thank all the witnesses for being here. At the end of the day this is about political decisions and whether or not this government has any intent, whatsoever, to make use of the testimony that we heard and to apply it to legislation in the House of Commons. Apparently, that seems to be void at this particular point in time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

You still have time.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

No, thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Mr. Sheehan, you have the last seven minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

It was great testimony today—very thoughtful and thought-provoking.

I'm going to go back, quickly, to the advisory council. We've been talking a lot about the numbers that should be there. Mr. Schreyer pointed out that there are examples of such councils with eight, ten, or twelve members. I asked what the advantages were of that and they said that they're nimble—for lack of a better term—in being able to respond quickly and get together. I asked about the large ones and there was an indication that larger ones of, say, fifty or so have an opportunity to perhaps have more representation on them.

However, we've sometimes seen in Canada examples of large boards on which, for example, females have not been represented very well or have been only to a small extent.

My question is to all of you, and it's about something I've been grappling with. We just had a bill before us, Bill C-25, which talked about diversity on boards and in decision-making. Also, in talking about the Liberal government, the Prime Minister indicated that in cabinet there would be gender parity, an equal number of women and men. Statistically, that's what we have here in this country.

My question is for all of you. I'd like your thoughts about having—regardless of the size, although size is an important thing that we must land on—a diverse board, particularly with more female representation on it.

If anybody would like to kick if off, please go ahead.

Margrit.

[Dr. Margrit Eichler]

I'd be happy to talk about that. I have a background in feminist studies, so I have given considerable thought to that. It is very clear that if you're differently located within a society—and women and men at this point are differently located—you have different issues that come up. So I think in general you can expect better questions and better representation of what the actual problems are if you have a more diverse type of group.

I would add that it would also be very helpful to have an aboriginal perspective, because there is, again, a totally different set of questions. In terms of the census, there were whole sets of aboriginal communities that didn't exist in that census, and so I think it's very important to have both gender parity and diversity, because it's the types of questions being asked that are important.

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

Thank you very much.

Would either one of you care to chime in?

[Jean-Guy Prévost]

Well, a council has to reflect or express the needs of users, so diversity goes hand in hand with this, but at the same time, statistical councils in many countries also have a role in assessing quality, and here there's an element of expertise that comes in. So I think you must also have in the council the elements of expertise, diversity, and the means to conduct a thorough evaluation of quality, but then have some distance vis-à-vis the statistical bureau, also.

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

Brian.

[Dr. Brian Allen]

Yes, there are all sorts of dimensions here when you start thinking about representation from various groups. Age hasn't been mentioned. Age is another element, and geographic representation as well.

But I think it would be important to have proper technical statistical representation, and perhaps some economic and other disciplines as well on the committee.

So that precludes, I think, having a very small committee, if one wants to have good representation and all in several different dimensions.

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

Mr. Schreyer, do you have any comments from Paris?

[Paul Schreyer]

I would just confirm that I do think, again, that the balance should be a matter of course for all bodies that we are looking at. In terms of technical expertise, that is indeed useful. I should add, however, that quality of statistics is not only a matter of technical accuracy. We also have as a quality dimension, also the factors of accessibility and use—and you don't need to be a probability specialist to make an informed statement about how useful the data is, and how easy it is to get hold of it.

But to cover those, I do still think that one can do it with a reasonable number of participants.

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

Those are good statements.

My next question is for Jean-Guy.

The proposed amendments being put forth in Bill C-36 are intended to reinforce the credibility of Statistics Canada and the ongoing trust of Canadians in their national statistical agency. My first question is, how will formalizing Statistics Canada's independence be better for Canadians in terms of the quality of the data?

[Jean-Guy Prévost]

Independence is mainly about maintaining credibility, I think. Quality depends a lot on the means that are provided to Statistics Canada, and that is not strictly a legal aspect. So I would think quality depends on assessing, on a regular basis, the programs, the results, the data. It's more a question of means than of legal aspects.

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

That's a fair statement.

Could you elaborate on the independence of Statistics Canada and the importance of its being independent from outside authorities? Will Bill C-36 make Statistics Canada more independent than it was before?

[Jean-Guy Prévost]

My point of view was that there is some progress in that direction in the bill. It could be improved, but we are moving from a law in which there was no mention of this. There was a culture of independence, but nothing was written in law. Now we're moving to a law where it will be written up to a certain degree. It could be improved, but it has moved forward, I think.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

We appreciate that very much.

On that note, we have a couple of minutes of housekeeping to take care of, so I'd ask everybody to just stay back.

I'd like to thank our panellists for coming in and sharing their thoughts and ideas with us. It's been very helpful. Thank you all very much, and have a great day.

There are just a couple of things. I'm sure you all received from the clerk information on the Royal Norwegian Embassy, which is for Monday, May 8, possibly Tuesday, May 9. I'm not sure what your thoughts are on that, but I will leave that there, and we can talk about it further on Thursday.

What I really did want to touch base on is that in our first hour on Thursday we will be working on our travel to Washington. We still need to finalize the members who will be going. Earl, I know you're there, but I'm not sure what's happening on the other side. Thursday is the last day before our trip, so we need to be able to finalize some things.

The clerk is going to send out a brief. We've been working on this brief back and forth from what people have been sending us, which hasn't been a lot, but we need to be able to hammer out the details on Thursday because we won't see each other again after that for two weeks.

Then in the second hour we will have the minister from 9:45 to 10:45. Those are the two things.

Are there any questions on the trip?

Brian.