By Peter Shawn Taylor

Statistics Canada is tasked with collecting, collating and publishing accurate information about the Canadian experience. Things it shouldn’t do: hide information from the public and randomly distribute the data it collects. A recent Statistics Canada report does both.

In October, Statistics Canada released the results of a survey of the drinking habits of Canadians. “A snapshot of alcohol consumption levels in Canada” asked Canadians how much they had drunk in the previous seven days. According to the topline figure, not much.

Fifty-four per cent of respondents said they hadn’t touched a drop in the previous week. Those who had taken a drink Statistics Canada placed in risk categories defined by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction. (In doing so, it ignored Ottawa’s “official” advice on alcohol consumption, but that’s another story). Fully 15 per cent of Canadians admitted to being in the “increasingly high risk” category of seven or more drinks per week.

Statistics Canada then sliced this information several different ways. By gender: men report drinking more than women, based on their relative share of “high-risk” drinking (19.3 per cent versus 11.1 per cent). By age: the biggest drinkers are 55-64-year-olds, with 17.4 per cent consuming at least one drink per day. Perhaps surprisingly, 18-22-year-olds report the lowest level of “high-risk” drinking, at 8.4 per cent.

Quebeckers are the biggest drinkers in the country, with 18.1 per cent in the “high-risk” category, while Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have the most teetotallers. There’s also detailed information on the drinking habits of rural versus urban residents, various occupational categories and income by quintile, with country folk drinking more than their city cousins and workers in the trades and transportation out-drinking the sales and service sectors.

Despite all this information, several significant demographic categories are missing from the report. And not by accident. In a footnote, Statistics Canada explained it took extra steps to collect high-quality information on the alcohol consumption of “racialized groups, Indigenous people and persons with disabilities.” But it then deliberately withheld this information “owing to the need to delve into the historical/cultural or other contexts for these groups.” In other words, Canada’s statistical agency chose to keep some of its data hidden, and for political reasons.

C2C Journal requested the missing data on the grounds it was in the public interest. After negotiations that included the threat of a $95-per-hour charge for their services, Statistics Canada eventually provided all of the information for free.

This once-hidden trove of data reveal little that seems noteworthy about the drinking habits of visible minorities, immigrants or the disabled, all of whom drink very little. It does show, however, that First Nations people are among the biggest drinkers in the country, with 20.1 per cent in the “high-risk” group. This is the second highest share among all demographic categories examined, exceeded only by the top income quintile’s 21.5 per cent.

The reason for the redaction seems obvious: to shield Indigenous people from the ignominy of being identified as among the country’s biggest drinkers. But this fact is already public knowledge. Since the earliest settlement by Europeans, it’s been well known that Indigenous people have been profoundly damaged by alcohol. And despite numerous efforts by colonial, national and Indigenous governments to curtail access, the problems persist. Today, rates of Fetal Alcohol Disease Syndrome — brought on by pregnant mothers who drink — are catastrophically higher in native communities than in the general Canadian population, often by a factor of 10 or greater.

Withholding new and relevant information about this issue will not fix the problem. Rather, hiding the true facts from Canadians could make it worse through inattention. Statistics Canada’s job is to collect and distribute high-quality data, not make value judgments about what other people might say about that information. Besides, it had no apparent qualms in identifying middle-aged Quebec males as the country’s biggest drinkers.

Unfortunately, this is not the only example of Statistics Canada’s recent fixation with identity. The same alcohol report also admits to randomizing data collected by gender. The agency no longer collects information on sex “assigned” at birth, preferring instead self-identified gender categories including transgender and non-binary. But rather than creating a multiplicity of new and tiny groupings, in most cases responses by gender are slotted into newly-created “Male+” and “Female+” categories. According to another footnote, Statistics Canada does this “by randomly distributing non-binary people into the Men+ and Women+ category.”

Statistics Canada thus carefully collects response from Canadians based on their self-identified gender choices, and then arbitrarily sprinkles some of this information between its two catch-all “+” categories. The number of non-binary Canadians is very small, accounting for a mere 0.13 per cent of the population, but randomizing their data inevitably erodes the usefulness of all results. This may make sense to woke-addled politicians and activists, but it is the opposite of good statistical practice.

Both errors can be directly linked to the federal government’s 2021 Data Disaggregation Action Plan, a five-year, $172-million program initially promoted as bringing greater statistical attention to matters of importance to marginalized groups. In practice, the action plan appears to be working in reverse —deliberately hiding from public view data crucial to understanding the experience of one group, and randomly shuffling the data of another.

After nearly a decade under the Trudeau Liberals, Statistics Canada is doing real harm to its own reputation.

Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal, where a longer version of this story first appeared.

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