Canadian Labour Reporter

7 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2014 CANADIAN LABOUR REPORTER "There's no smoking gun to say this par- ticular error was the result of budget cuts. Any organization that's losing hundreds of trained staff, many tens of thousands of dol- lars and facing some politically-motivated mi- cromanagement, there's no doubt about that," Stanford said, adding that "Clearly, they need a double-check mechanism to prevent that from occurring again." But Michaud countered that "the Labour Force Survey budget was not cut, so (the error) cannot be attributed directly to that." According to Philip Cross, a senior fellow at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute and former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, to err is human. "It raises your eyebrow, but it's not unusual," Cross said, adding that, in 30-plus years work- ing at the statistical agency, he made one mis- take. "It happens, human beings are imperfect." "If you're not trying to improve your data, you're falling behind. The world is constantly changing. It's constantly a challenge for Statis- tics Canada," Cross said. The Labour Force Survey, for instance, would do well to beef up some of its focus ar- eas. Cross suggested taking a closer look at the ways in which citizens exit the workforce, as opposed to how they enter the workforce. The definition of a retired person can have various meanings — Cross himself said he collects a pension from Statistics Canada but would not consider himself in retirement. More focus should also be placed on precar- ious and part-time work to reflect a changing labour force. Cross cited the problem of those workers who live in Ontario but take one or two-week job assignments in Alberta. Keeping up with the consumer Statistics Canada is also undergoing a major overhaul of its other flagship report, the con- sumer price index (CPI), which is nearing the tail-end of a five-year undertaking. "We were lagging in terms of what the inter- national recommendations say we should be do- ing in terms of quality adjusting and accounting for the changes in characteristics of products," explained Richard Evans, director of Statistics Canada's consumer prices division. As such, the revised methodology will re- flect international best practices. One of the most prominent changes is updating the bas- ket weights every four years to every two years. This will give users a more accurate picture of the pure inflation rate, as opposed to reflecting that the product themselves have changed. This is especially important in a world where technology advances so rapidly, items can be rendered obsolete in mere months (think iP- ods, televisions and cellphones). Quality ad- justing plays its part here, as it accounts for fac- tors such as screen widths or phone features. Assigning a basket weight puts the way Ca- nadians spend their money in perspective. For example, cheese and gasoline may both be in- cluded in the basket of goods measured, but in most cases, a person is likely to spend much more per month on fuel than cheese. "This matters especially in a low inflation environment because every little tenth of a percentage in the growth of the CPI is being scrutinized," Evans said. Though the method of choice for the agen- cy remains the household CPI survey, Evans noted new trends emerging on the interna- tional stage that Statistics Canada is exploring. That includes web scraping, in which data is obtained using software to pull statistics from certain websites. One of the most promising areas, Evans said, is scanner data. When an item is pur- chased at a checkout, a cashier will scan a bar- code and create a record in a database. If Sta- tistics Canada had access to that information, it would be able to determine how many units are sold at a much faster rate than sending in- terviewers into stores. "You could have an instantaneous, real-time CPI," he said. "That's a slow process, to survey. It's old technology, but we're starting to experi- ment to look at the big data that's all around us." news Photo: Carlos Rawlins (Reuters) Scanner data is one of the new trends Statistics Canada is experimenting with when it comes to information gathering. The method involves accessing a database of figures immediately recorded when cashiers scan the barcodes for everyday items at grocery and retail stores. Sharper picture of inflation rate forthcoming < from pg. 1

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