Census changes to complicate bank's analyses, Carney says

Share

The Bank of Canada has long focused on productivity, labour and households as a means of assessing the country's economy and steering it toward better footing.

But Governor Mark Carney says that the bank may no longer be able to rely on data from Statistics Canada for these analyses because of proposed changes to the census.

Mr. Carney told The Globe and Mail editorial board on Thursday that those changes could have an impact on the quality of research in those important areas and force the bank to supplement the information with its own research.

"There is a non-trivial range of data that could be affected," Mr. Carney said.

Controversy has raged in recent months over the federal government's decision to abolish the mandatory long-form census, the country's richest source of knowledge on the state of its population, in favour of a voluntary household survey. Economists, medical researchers, lawyers and social scientists say the June decision will erode the collective intelligence of Canadian society from the neighbourhood to the national level.

It could also harm the central bank's ability to analyze how the economy is faring. While the Governor carefully said the bank will work with Statistics Canada to understand the implications of the change, he elaborated on the range of research that could be affected - key information the bank depends upon to track economic developments and set monetary policy.

When asked which data could be affected, Mr. Carney said, "that's part of what we're going to have to work through. Obviously a series of surveys on the household side, and the potential implications for the labour force survey ... there could be issues around the productivity data, some of the other national accounts, and then you get into more granular data ... some of our longer-term research could be affected."

The central bank draws from a wealth of information about subjects from the job market to housing and household debt to track the economy, and help decide whether to adjust the country's trend-setting overnight lending rate.

Mr. Carney, named one of this year's most influential people by Time magazine, said in July the bank is monitoring how the census changes affect the quality of Statscan data. It's too early to discern the full impact of the decision, he said yesterday.

The central bank uses Statscan data, conducts its own surveys and analysis, and buys private data. Mr. Carney said the bank will work with the statistical agency to figure out where it must supplement data, and do its best - "within the constraints of our budget."

Statscan's top statistician, Munir Sheikh, resigned in July after Industry Minister Tony Clement implied the civil servant was comfortable with scrapping the census. A replacement has not yet been named.

More than 350 groups from different areas of Canadian society have said they oppose making the long-form census voluntary.

Roger Martin, innovation guru and dean of the Rotman School of Management, has said the move will hurt the ability of Canadian companies to compete globally and boost productivity, while preventing Canadians from having "a sophisticated economy that uses information to its best."

A July survey by the Canadian Association for Business Economics found three-quarters of economists oppose the census change while 6 per cent support it.

Scrapping the census is a "huge business blunder" that will result in lost jobs and more bankruptcies because firms won't have solid information upon which to make decisions, Queen's University business professor John Pliniussen said in an interview on Thursday.

Part of the federal government's concern is that Canadians shouldn't be threatened with jail time if they don't fill out their census. In the history of taking the census, no Canadian has ever been jailed for not doing so.