Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow Philip Cross spoke to the Ottawa Citizen for a story on the impact that budget cutbacks have had on the agency’s ability to collect and organize data.
Some have argued that the downsizing of recent years has made it more difficult for Stats Can to present an accurate portrait of the economy and other measures to Canadians.
Cross, however, argues that the Stats Can downsizing has created a “better, leaner, more focused organization”.
“I think this is something that every organization should go through every once in a while: it forces you out of your comfort zone”, Cross told the paper.
The article was also published by the Edmonton Journal, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, the Montreal Gazette, the Vancouver Province and the Regina Leader-Post.
It comes several weeks after Stats Can announced that it had erred in calculating its jobs report for July.
Cross argued, in op-eds for the National Post and the Globe and Mail and in media interviews, that the mistake had little to do with cutbacks to the agency’s budget.
Instead, he said, the error reminds us of the impact that human errors can have when working with vast tracts of data.
