Natural Resources Committee on April 24th, 2018

[Greg Peterson]

We have identified gaps in the data on renewables. We have a number of partners that are keen on our improving the timeliness of our data. We're continually being asked to produce more granularity. There is a concern among energy users that we are suppressing data cells if our data identifies what's happening within an individual business. However, in some cases, we wind up publishing pages of Xs. So we're looking at new methodologies either to get respondents to allow us to release that data or at methodologies to perturb the data, which would allow us to report on some trends and to release more data while protecting the confidentiality of individual respondents. There is a lot of work to do.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Excellent.

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

You have a minute.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Okay, I'll go back to my friends at Environment. This is more of a provincial issue but it relates to data, and I wasn't going to do that, but Marc Serré is over there, so I have to ask it.

Do you or does anyone in your department have any data on the number of birds that have been severely impacted by the wind turbines in Ontario especially?

[Derek Hermanutz]

That would be a question for a follow-up from the department.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Perfect. I would love to see that if possible. Thank you.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

And me too.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Save the birds, exactly, Marc. Absolutely.

This is more a comment than a question. We do know that the Ontario government got an exemption from the species at risk program to allow wind turbines to go up in certain areas. So I would love to get a response back from you that I could bring to the people asking me how this happened. I would appreciate that follow-up. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. Cannings.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you, all, for being here today.

I'm going to start with Statistics Canada and talk about this whole idea of the need for a one-stop shopping centre, a hub. We've seen that in the U.S., the Energy Information Administration seems to be a model of that.

Could you comment on whether Statistics Canada could provide that service or whether it would be better to create a new hub. Using the U.S. as an example, do they do things better than we do? Is it because of the differences in their states or federal structure?

[Greg Peterson]

I think I could answer.

First, could we create a data hub? Yes, we've done that in other areas.

Regarding the EIA itself, different countries organize their statistics in different ways. In Canada we have chosen to create one single national statistical office that assembles all official statistics together.

The United States has a decentralized system and has evolved into a governance structure quite a bit different from ours. You have the U.S. Energy Information Administration that focuses on collecting information on energy production and transmission and forecasting. For sure, it has a state-of-the-art system in producing this information, but if you go back to the stylized facts that I gave you in my second slide, if I were to assemble that information from the United States, those data points wouldn't come from the EIA. They would come from the U. S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U. S. Census Bureau, the National Science Foundation, and I think I'm missing one, but it would be collected from various parts across the federal statistical system in the United States.

For sure, the EIA has centralized some part of its statistical system into one body. However, the United States still operates in a fairly decentralized fashion, which gives them issues from time to time with the sharing of information between different statistical agencies.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Right. Again, using the U.S. or other countries for comparison's sake, do they have the same challenges we have in obtaining industry data? Are there different laws or rules about reporting data from industry in different countries?

I'm trying to get at whether there is something that the Canadian federal government could do to move to a better model of data collection.

[Greg Peterson]

Again, I'm not an expert in the legislative backing behind the federal statistical system in the United States, but we already have within the Statistics Act the authority to survey businesses and individuals. We already have the authority to acquire administrative data from any jurisdiction, corporation, or organization. The legislative framework already exists, then, for us to acquire that information.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Again, I mentioned earlier, with the previous witnesses, the problems of different data formats and different kinds of data coming from different provinces. You have data-sharing agreements, but is there an overall movement to try to make that data more coherent and gathered in the same way across provinces? I'm just wondering where that process is and if it could be improved.

[Greg Peterson]

We already acquire data from various jurisdictions. We already acquire data from most provincial regulators. You are right. It would be a lot easier if we could get everybody to report to us the data in a similar format, using some similar definitions and metadata. In a way that's our job at Statistics Canada, to bring together disparate data sources and hammer them into a consistent framework.

I mentioned during my presentation that it would be helpful if there were better co-operation and some more formal governance, perhaps. For sure, we have to include our provincial and territorial governments in this exercise, so that we can achieve some of things you're talking about. Ideally, everybody would be reporting everything in the exact same way.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Just to finish up on that theme, if we had one coherent national hub of energy information, would you see StatsCan as the logical home for that?

[Greg Peterson]

We can certainly play a role in the collection of information, bringing it together and publishing it. However, there is not one body that can do it all. It has to be done in collaboration with others.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

There are 20 different players, I heard, that are collecting data on energy. You can't have one place where I could go to get information, where StatsCan could be the provider, and you would do all the hard work and heavy lifting for me to gather all that data, crunch it, and make it coherent.

[Greg Peterson]

If you're talking about a single information hub, that is a model we've had in other places, and it's a model we could duplicate in energy.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I'll move to the Department of the Environment. You mentioned you had to do work to reduce a variation in quality of data. Again, I assume it's from different agencies in different provinces. Does that get reported back to them? If you clean up a dataset, do they clean up their own?

[Jacqueline Gonçalves]

Certainly it's an annual process, so the collaboration is ongoing.

We often find, for example, that we receive data from Statistics Canada that has been collected from the provinces and territories. We then look at it and make sure that we apply the appropriate quality controls to it. We then share it with the provinces and territories for them to also have a look at before it's published officially. Sometimes they will come across discrepancies or differences between the data we've provided to them and what they have.

So there is a process of collaboration that goes into trying to resolve the discrepancies, but that is an ongoing annual cycle.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Whalen.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you so much.

Thank you to Mr. Harvey for allowing me to use some of his time. I'm totally geeking out here.

[TJ Harvey, Liberal, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I'm so generous. It never ends.