Locked
OTTAWA — Canada's new chief statistician, Munir Sheikh, is a natural when it comes to numbers.
He was out driving with his wife this summer when they realized they needed to call Sears. As he fumbled to find the right number, he turned to his wife and said, “You know, I have a feeling I somehow know that number.”
She dialled it, and, indeed, it was Sears.
“The only thing I can think of is that I must have called Sears six years ago to talk about my treadmill. I don't know how it happened,” Mr. Sheikh said in an interview during which he ticked off the exact dates of developments in his 36-year career as an economist in the federal civil service.
“I hear some numbers and I just remember them. I don't make any effort. They just stick in my mind.”
Mr. Sheikh took over Statistics Canada this summer, the first new chief statistician the country has had in 22 years. He replaced Ivan Fellegi, a mathematician who earned the statistical agency kudos around the world for its methods and accuracy, but also entrenched the government institution with a strict hierarchical structure.
Mr. Sheikh said he has no intention of change for change's sake. But it's clear he is shaking things up, in an effort, he said, to align the agency's focus with major changes gripping Canada: globalization, climate change, and inflation.
“We have to evolve with the country,” he said. “Evolution is where we'll put our priority in the future.”
Statscan's numbers are at the centre of how Canada understands itself and how Canadians feel about their country and their lives, he said. And so the agency needs to be flexible enough to be on top of what they need and want to know.
“The data that we provide is really the foundation for a country to function well,” he said. “People look at the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the crime index, and all those sorts of things, and make decisions on a daily basis on their way of operating in our society.”
He has ordered a complete re-examination of everything Statistics Canada does, to be completed by January at the latest, with the aim of determining exactly how relevant the agency's data collection is.
He wants to substantially beef up information on trade, investment and globalization, so that Canadians have a precise picture of how their corporations interact and make money with the rest of the world. And he wants to improve the way statisticians measure the contribution of services to the economy – an area on which getting a solid grip is notoriously difficult.
On the social data side of the agency, Mr. Sheikh said there's a crying need to quantify Canada's performance in health care and the environment. But that's easier said than done. When it comes to economics, everything is quantifiable by price, but that's not the case with social data.
“On the social side, the issues are so diverse, and the lack of anything that can aggregate all the information – anything like price on the social side of the equation just doesn't exist,” he lamented.
There are already signs that Mr. Sheikh is giving Statscan a makeover.
The statistical agency produces reams of specialized data, but its best-known publication is probably The Daily – a quick overview of mainly economic indicators released every morning at 8:30 a.m.
Frequent users have become used to a straightforward and slightly chatty analysis accompanied by a few graphs and a table containing key numbers.
But since Mr. Sheikh took the helm, the tone has changed. He vets every major release, and users of Statscan data are finding their eyes drawn to focus on different numbers than they have become accustomed to.
In one report, it was a highlighting of real growth instead of nominal; in another report, the focus was on a three-month trend instead of a year-over-year pattern.
In a recent unemployment release, the emphasis was on job gains in previous months rather than steep job losses in the most recent month.
That one raised the hackles of organized labour.
“Am I the only one who detected a distinct note of spin-doctoring in the write-up of Statistics Canada's eye-popping labour force release yesterday?” blogged Canadian Auto Workers' economist Jim Stanford after the publication of the July jobs figures.
After the release of another data-heavy report, Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns, commented: “Statscan has gone minimalist.”
National statistical agencies are often seen in a spectrum, ranging from a “just-the-facts” approach that only releases data and no analysis to the analytical and descriptive method that can border on being prescriptive.
Statscan has always tried to steer delicately down the middle, and most observers say they've been successful at producing accurate, relatively timely data with analysis that is helpful to the general public.
“Until recently, Statscan's reputation would have been peerless,” Mr. Stanford allowed.
But there is pressure to move toward the dry side of the spectrum. Bureaucrats within the Department of Finance have often pushed for a less descriptive approach by Statscan, since it gives policy makers more leeway to interpret data in a way that backs up their policies, economists say.
And Bay Street economists would rather put their own “spin” on the numbers, rather than have Statscan take a first crack at it, Mr. Porter said.
“I'd prefer to be given just the statistics, and let me make the conclusions,” he said. “I worry that there can be an agenda. You can cut a statistic so many different ways … It can be dangerous.”
But Mr. Sheikh denies that he is shifting Statscan to the dry side of the spectrum. The daily statistical reports are briefer, and may have a different focus than those in the past, but those changes are not part of a conscious effort to redefine the agency, he said.
“These are changes that really have been forced upon us by the change in the economy itself,” he said.
“The way I look at it is, ‘What is the economy telling us?' and then just report it. Let's not intervene in what the economy is telling us, and put our own biased views on it.”
Or as one insider put it, the new approach is: “If you have nothing to say, shut up.”
Statistics Canada has long held a sterling reputation internationally, mainly because it is a “centralized, efficient one-stop shopping” source of data, said Duncan McDowall, professor of economic history at Carleton University.
While he won't wager where Mr. Sheikh is leading the agency, he warns that not everyone has a mind for numbers like the chief statistician does.
“Dry statistics are just that; they're detached from the reality of people.”