Records deleted, burned, tossed in Dumpsters. A Maclean’s investigation on the crisis in government data Anne Kingston September 18, 2015
When told that his small Prairie town had, in profound ways, fallen off the statistical map of Canada, Walter Streelasky, mayor of Melville, Sask., is incredulous. Streelasky had no idea Melville had been rendered a “statistical ghost town” after the mandatory long-form census was cut in 2010, and fewer than 50 per cent of the one third of Melville’s 4,500 residents who got the voluntary National Household Survey that replaced it in 2011 completed the form. Melville still exists—but as a shadow. We know how many people live there, but nothing about them—where they work, their education levels, whether they’re married, single or divorced, how many are immigrants, how many are unemployed, how many live in poverty. Melville’s numbers, then, aren’t factored into Canadian employment numbers or divorce rates or poverty rates. According to Sask Trends Monitor, the high non-response rate in the province resulted in “no socioeconomic statistics about the populations in about one-half of Saskatchewan communities.” Nationally, we’re missing similar data on 20 per cent of StatsCan’s 4,556 “census subdivisions,” making a fifth of Canada’s recognized communities statistical dead zones. “To be dropped off the face of the Earth is pretty frightening,” says Streelasky, noting that Melville appears very much alive from his office: “We can smell the wildfires burning.” He plans to discuss the situation with his MP: “It’s the obligation of the federal government to make national data collection as complete as possible.” Towns like Melville are far from the only entities vanishing from official Canadian records. Physicist Raymond Hoff, who published more than 50 reports on air pollution in transport and toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes—including pioneering work on acid rain—at Environment Canada between 1975 and 1999, doesn’t seem to exist, either. “Nothing comes up when I type my name into the search engine on [Environment Canada’s] website,” says Hoff, now a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Also gone are internal reports on the oil sands experiments of the 1970s. “That research was paid for by the taxpayer. Now, the people who need to protect Canada’s environment can’t get access.” Protecting Canadians’ access to data is why Sam-Chin Li, a government information librarian at the University of Toronto, worked late into the night with colleagues in February 2013, frantically trying to archive the federal Aboriginal Canada portal before it disappeared on Feb. 12. The decision to kill the site, which had thousands of links to resources for Aboriginal people, had been announced quietly weeks before; the librarians had only days to train with web-harvesting software. The need for such efforts has taken on new urgency since 2014, says Li, when some 1,500 websites were centralized into one, with more than 60 per cent of content shed. Now that reporting has switched from print to digital only, government information can be altered or deleted without notice, she says. (One example: In October 2012, the word “environment” disappeared entirely from the section of the Transport Canada website discussing the Navigable Waters Protection Act.)  (Derek Mortensen) Stories about government data and historical records being deleted, burned—even tossed into [TAP TO TWEET] Less discussed, however, is how data erasure also threatens the economy, industry, the arts, and the country’s ability to compete internationally. The 2013 report “Information management in the Canadian federal government” is a title not likely to attract the non-librarian reader. But the conclusions drawn by its authors, a librarian at Carleton University and an information-management consultant, are chilling. Isla Jordan and Ulla de Stricker describe a country “without access to large parts of its institutional memory, and leaders without access to the information needed for strategic decision-making.” Toni Samek, a professor at the school of library and information studies at the University of Alberta, puts it more succinctly. Canada is facing a “national amnesia,” she says, a condition that will block its ability to keep government accountable, remember its past and plan its future.
associate director of the U.S. Census Bureau who is co-director of the Washington-based Census Project, a group fighting to maintain the U.S. equivalent of a mandatory long-term census in the face of Republican calls for its elimination. He calls the Canadian experience “an unmitigated disaster.” The census’s elimination damaged Canada’s international reputation, says John Henstridge, president of the Statistical Society of Australia. “Prior to that, Statistics Canada was regarded as possibly the best government statistical body in the world.” But the census is far from the only issue; less discussed is the 2012 elimination of four key longitudinal studies, some dating to the 1970s, which tracked health, youth, income and employment. Economist Miles Corak, a professor at University of Ottawa who studies income inequality and poverty, calls this a major informational loss, as well as “money down the drain.” “Longitudinal studies are very expensive,” Corak says, “but their value increases exponentially with time.” He compares the loss to stopping watching a movie halfway: “Only after you follow a group of children for 12 or 15 years, and they’re on the cusp of entering the labour market, do you have the capacity to see how adult success is foreshadowed by their family origins.” Statistics tell a human story, Corak says: “We think of statistics as cold, but they are the real lives of people embedded in bits and bytes. They live and breathe.” Related reading by John Geddes: Why Stephen Harper thinks he’s smarter than the experts Cutting the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study tracking economic well-being since the mid-’90s, left the country unable to measure changes in income over the longer term, says economist Stephen Gordon, a professor at Université Laval. It was replaced by the Canadian Income Survey, which uses a different methodology; now, old income data can’t be connected with new income data, he says. The upshot? Comprehensive Canadian income-data history currently begins in 2012. Gordon expresses alarm that 20 years of data history between 1960 and 1980 vanished in 2012 due to changes in the way national accounts, GDP and other data were compiled: “It’s now impossible to have a clear picture of the Canadian economy since the Second World War,” he says. And that’s a huge problem for analysts who need to look at pressing concerns, such as the current oil price crash in context. “You want to look at data about oil prices rising in the ’70s, but you can’t.” Lost StatsCan studies have been replaced by new studies—but what the new data track can be telling. The Households and the Environment Survey, begun in 2013, for example, tracks Canadians’ involvement with the environment—using measures such as birdwatching and volunteerism. The latest data reveal that 25 per cent of households have bird houses or feeders, and 18 per cent engaged in unpaid activities aimed at “conservation or protection of the environment or wildlife.” Yet tax-funded environmental monitoring, conservation and protection has been debilitated with the closure of 200 scientific research institutions, many of which monitored food safety and environmental contaminants. Some were internationally famous. The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Nunavut, which played a key role in discovering a huge hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic, closed in 2012. Also shuttered was a brand-new climate-controlled facility at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick. The original station provided writer Rachel Carson with documentation of DDT killing salmon in local rivers reported in her 1960 book Silent Spring, credited with giving rise to environmentalism. The data gap naturally affects policy. “How can Environment Canada know how pollution from the oil sands has changed over the last 30 years, if they don’t have access to baseline reports?” asks Hoff, who reports that former Environment Canada colleagues call him for reports they can no longer access internally. Fisheries scientist Jeffrey Hutchings, a professor at Dalhousie University, says he can’t find studies on cod stocks dating to the 19th century that he referenced two decades ago at the now-closed St. John’s library, which had profound implications for cod management. “The work I was able to do then couldn’t be done now.” The effects of penny-wise, short-term thinking are being felt in some of our most important research organizations. Consider the changes at Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the country’s primary health research funding agency, says Yalnizyan. Earlier this year, the CIHR outraged the scientific community when it announced that, as of September, it would no longer fund Cochrane Canada, part of a respected global collective known for “evidence-based,” system atic reviews free from commercial sponsorship and conflict of interest. But outlays for Cochrane—less than $2 million annually—were cost-efficient: For the $100,000 CIHR pays for a single “knowledge synthesis,” Cochrane can produce five. The National Research Council (NRC), the country’s pre-eminent scientific institution, has seen a similar erosion following its shift in focus from pure science to applied science. “The NRC was the Rolls-Royce of federal science,” says Kerr, the University of Ottawa biologist. It now defines itself on its website as a “concierge service”—“a single access point where small and medium-sized enterprises can find high-quality, timely advice to help them innovate and accelerate their growth.” Output has plummeted: Published research, in areas ranging from medical technologies to astrophysics, declined from 1,425 reports in 2010 to 436 in 2012. Innovation, measured in patents filed, also declined, from three in 2010 to zero in 2012. “Their research mission has been destroyed.” Failing to invest in pure science is ultimately bad for business, says Katie Gibbs, executive director of the advocacy group Evidence for Democracy. “It may not pay off in the short term, but it’s necessary to feed applied science,” she says, pointing out that many technological advances that drive our economy and quality of life—cellphones, satellites, GPS, MRIs, even Velcro—had their starts in government-funded basic research. Nowhere is the information deficit more acute than in Canadians’ ability to assess government’s own functioning. Assessing the performance of a government that turns—and campaigns—on its economic record has been compromised as a result, a serious problem during a federal election, says Yalnizyan: “We have no income data post-2011 on a historically comparable basis, other than from tax records, which don’t give us information about families or poverty or inequality. I don’t think that is by accident.” Corak, too, has concerns: “Income levels are something Canadians should be as aware of as much as the inflation rate and unemployment rate: ‘How much money do they make on average? How is that distributed?’ ” Data erasure, unsurprisingly, is an election issue itself, with the NDP, Liberals and Greens all vowing to restore the long-form census. In the absence of readily available information, a record number of individual Canadians are turning to the mechanism to access internal government records and information, the Access to Information and Privacy system (ATIP). But that system is also a shambles. Fewer requests are being processed, at a more glacial pace with more redactions. Information commissioner Suzanne Legault found in a 2015 report that only 21 per cent of access requests in the 2013-14 fiscal year resulted in information released, compared to 40 per cent in 1999-2000. Legault made 85 recommendations for reform, including extending coverage to the Prime Minister, ministers and parliamentary secretaries. A recent change allowing government bureaucrats to determine whether material is classifiable as “cabinet documents” that are exempt from ATIP concerns Vincent Gogolek, executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association: “The process is opaque,” he says. “Even the information commissioner is not allowed to look at it. So, no one can say, ‘Yes, they are applying this properly.’ ” Also disturbing is Bill C-59—this year’s budget bill—which retroactively revised the ATIP law in an effort to exempt all records for the defunct long-gun registry, from any form of request, including complaint, investigation, judicial review or appeal. The change was made as Legault was poised to recommend possible criminal charges against the RCMP for withholding—and later destroying—gun-registry documents. By backdating the ATIP law’s revision to October 2011, the change effectively rewrote history, a “perilous precedent,” as Legault put it, that could be used by governments to retroactively rewrite laws. Treasury Board President Tony Clement did not respond to Maclean’s interview requests, but he has rejected criticism directed at ATIP: “We are the most open and transparent government in the history of this country, and we are darn proud of it,” he told the House of Commons earlier this year, noting that the current government has processed the most ATIP requests. “That’s because they’ve received the most ATIP requests,” says Gogolek, “which is something they also use to blame the delays on.” ATIP cases now clog the judiciary: The Federal Court of Appeal intervened earlier this year, when a citizen seeking information on the sale of military assets was told it would take 1,100 days. In 2013, an Ontario court had to order the federal government to release thousands of pages of documents detailing government involvement in residential schools withheld from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “It really got in the way of the truth-telling,” says Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. ATIP delays affected a complaint her organization filed with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal claiming the federal government discriminated against First Nations children, she says. An ATIP she filed in November 2012 was received in April 2013, after hearings started. The hearings were postponed when it was discovered the government had withheld 90,000 pages of documents. A pattern of disappearing information has raised questions about political interference, notably, after the Canada Revenue Agency ordered employees to destroy all text-message records. The concern is that the agency was covering up evidence of a crackdown on charities that opposed government policy. The census scandal drew international criticism. Government interfering in statistical gathering is both unusual and unacceptable, says Denise Lievesley, social statistics professor and dean of faculty at King’s College London and former director of statistics at UNESCO: “We were quite shocked when that decision was a political decision.”  (Kayla Chobotiuk) than ever before, says Brian Campbell, former head librarian at the Vancouver Central Library. “The decline in gathering social data about Canadians is occurring just as the government’s ability to gather information about and monitor Canadians is unprecedented,” he says. Yalnizyan agrees. “Government is more intrusive and more coercive of information than we’ve ever seen, with the passage of Bill C-51, and Bill C-377, which requires unions to publish information about their leaders—not only how much money they make, but also what they do on the job, as well as their time off the job.” The Voices-Voix study documented more than 100 cases of the government monitoring groups and individuals, among them civil servants, women’s groups, human rights organizations and Indigenous organizations. Blackstock saw her professional and personal life was monitored; in her case, the conduct was determined by the privacy commissioner to be in violation of the Privacy Act. “They were trying to discredit me, rather than arguing the [child welfare] case on the evidence,” Blackstock says, noting 189 various officials followed her movements: “Beyond being shocked and horrified, as a taxpayer, I thought, ‘What a huge waste of money.’ ” Tax money was also deployed to try to dissuade the L.A.-based Society of Brain Mapping and Therapeutics from giving Liberal MP Kirsty Duncan, a former scientist who sat on Al Gore’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an award in 2012. Babak Kateb, a neuroscientist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A., who is the chairman and CEO of the society, says he received a call from the Canadian consulate in L.A. discouraging him from proceeding with recognizing Duncan. “I was shocked by the meddling,” Kateb told Maclean’s, adding that the government later participated in the society’s 2015 conference. “Your current government doesn’t know how to deal with science,” he says. “On one hand, they object to an award being given to a champion of science, but then, years later, support the organization she is on the board of. They don’t have a compass.” Related reading from Paul Wells: Stephen Harper, friend of science, kind of The vanishing of Canada has created a counterinsurgency—scientists, researchers, economists, civil rights groups, librarians and artists marshalling resources and their own time to monitor, expose, protest and create a new literature of knowledge loss. Li, for one, has taken preservation of national records into private hands by spearheading an effort with universities across the country dubbed LOCKSS—“Lots of copies, keep stuff safe”—to archive federal websites, an exercise not unlike trapping fireflies in a jar: “Without that or a print record, there’s no way of tracking change.” After the government changed Crown copyright policy, guidelines for legally reproducing its documents in 2013, Li went online for the old copy. It had vanished. In July, Evidence for Democracy launched True North Smart and Free, an interactive website documenting seven years of changes to how science is collected and used in federal policy decision-making. Meanwhile, as actual information vanishes, it’s being replaced by mythologizing historical narratives. As stations monitoring climate change close in the Arctic, historic missions in the North, notably, the Franklin expedition, are celebrated; at a time when veterans’-services offices have been closed and StatsCan no longer tracks military personnel, or wages and salaries of veterans, soldiers who fought historic wars are memorialized, with $28 million spent on the anniversary of the War of 1812, in one example. Archival history is a casualty when a country is in a severe economic, military and political crisis, says Robin Vose, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. “Why do we need to let it fall victim in peacetime, when we’re an affluent society?” Yet LAC did recently add to the national archives, making its first purchase this April in almost a year: a parcel of 19th-century paintings, illustrations and journal materials from the Peter Winkworth collection of Canadiana. The single-most expensive purchase, at $46,750, was an 1883 oil painting of a fish hatchery in Newcastle, N.B. (part of Miramichi) by Edward Scope Shrapnel. The irony is acute. We’ve lost data, trashed records and stopped monitoring vital aspects of fisheries and acquatic life. But we’ve gained an idyllic rendering of an ecologically untroubled time that now serves as yet another indictment of what has been lost. – With Zoe McKnight and Monika Warzecha The story has been edited to clarify the fact that one third of residents in Melville, Sask. got the NHS in 2011. Source: http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were-all-losers-in-ottawas-war-on-data/ |
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