In the dark: The cost of Canada’s data deficit

Two months after Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. President, a couple of Princeton economists published a research paper that accidentally suggested a reason why.

The findings showed something shocking about a core part of Mr. Trump’s voter base: White, middle-aged Americans, especially those without a college degree, were dying at a rising pace.

This kind of thing is not supposed to happen in industrialized societies. Mortality rates have been declining for decades in comparable rich countries, and even for blacks and Hispanics in the United States. Most disturbing of all, the phenomenon was being driven by what the two economists called “deaths of despair” – those caused by drugs, alcohol and suicide. The white working class was literally poisoning itself to death.

Naturally, researchers in other countries began to wonder if the same thing was happening in their backyards. In Canada, one of those people was Arjumand Siddiqi, a public-health scholar at the University of Toronto with an impressive résumé that includes a doctorate from Harvard and a co-appointment at the University of North Carolina. If anyone was going to replicate the study in Canada, and find out if working-class white Canadians were dying at a growing rate, it was her.

So, Prof. Siddiqi set out to do just that. What she found, though, was that she couldn’t. The numbers weren’t there. In Canada, death records – which Princeton professors Angus Deaton and Anne Case had used – do not tell you the person’s race and education level.

Prof. Siddiqi had to get creative. She put in a request with Statistics Canada, asking it for access to a database that links national mortality numbers with census results. Statscan agreed, but made the linked data available for only three census years – 1991, 1996, and 2001 – which wouldn’t give a picture of the whole population annually and over time. And it was the whole U.S. population, annually and over time, that Profs. Deaton and Case were looking at.

“That was when we realized that, ‘Wow, we just went through all of that and we can’t get the data,’ ” Prof. Siddiqi says.

In the end, she gave up. Our nearest neighbour was experiencing an unprecedented social crisis – one with the apparent power to reshape American society in dramatic ways – and there was no clear way to find out if the same thing was happening in Canada. She remembers feeling both disappointment and frustration: “It was like, ‘Here we go again.’ ” This wasn’t the first time Prof. Siddiqi had run into gaps in Canadian public data.

And she wasn’t alone. At a time when distorted numbers ricochet around the Internet at the speed of a 4G connection, reliable, accessible data about our society is more valuable than ever. And yet, in fields ranging from public health to energy economics to the labour force to the status of children with disabilities, there’s a lot that Canada simply doesn’t know about itself.

Consider that we don’t have a clear national picture of the vaccination rate in particular towns and cities. We don’t know the Canadian marriage or divorce rate. We don’t know how much drug makers pay the Canadian doctors who are charged with prescribing their products. We don’t have detailed data on the level of lead in Canadian children’s blood. We don’t know the rate at which Canadian workers get injured. We don’t know the number of people who are evicted from their homes. We don’t even know how far Canadians drive – a seeming bit of trivia that can tell us about an economy’s animal spirits, as well as the bite that green policies are having.