Canada Data in the dark on Housing, broken Shelter and Incarceration systems, Indiginous and Mental Health

“We don’t know the number of people who are evicted from their homes.” 

Eric Andrew-Gee and Tavia Grant wrote an indepth report published by the Globe and Mail on January 26, 2019 revealing Canada’s missing data which would best support our marginalized and vulnerable, including the homeless. While we do not have adequate data to best plan and fund for current crises such as homelessness, low cost and long term support solutions based on the available American and European data shoud be utilized as a evidence to a way forward for Canadians.

Mentor Mentee Canada has a strong data and statistics based case to help alleviate tax payors and society’s emergency situations and systemic failures. A 2017 study of the government’s efforts to settle Syrian refugees – one of the Trudeau government’s signature initiatives – found that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada was not gathering numbers on such key measures as the average number of months those refugees spent on income assistance, the effectiveness of the language training they have received, or the percentage of refugee children attending school.

Or take, for example, the issue of education and job training for Indigenous people, a population with labour-force-participation and postsecondary-completion rates lower than that of other Canadians. Last year, the auditor-general found that Indigenous Services Canada was drastically underreporting the high-school dropout rate for on-reserve First Nations students – counting only those who dropped out in their final year, not those who left school even earlier, between Grades 9 and 11. Between 2011 and 2016, the department falsely reported that almost half of those students were finishing high school; in fact, it was closer to one-quarter.

The auditor-general also found that Employment and Social Development Canada, a department that runs job-training programs to help vulnerable populations find “sustainable and meaningful work,” knew almost nothing about the nature of the jobs its Indigenous clients were getting – including whether those jobs were part-time or full-time, or how long people stayed in them. As a result, the government had only a tenuous handle on whether the programs were working.

“If you don’t have good information or data on the performance of a program, it’s difficult to monitor it,” notes Mr. Wheeler. What’s more, he points out, there’s no way to answer a key question: “ ‘Do we increase funding or reduce funding?’ ”

Of course, government data aren’t all about dollars and cents. The information can save lives and alleviate the misery of people living in the shadows.New Zealand, for example, has estimated that every dollar it spends on its census generates a net benefit of at least five dollars in the national economy, in part by allowing the government to better target funding for health care and for programs aimed at improving outcomes for Indigenous citizens. In Britain, a 2013 report by the accountancy firm Deloitte estimated that the data held by the public sector in that country – and released for use and reuse – were worth more than $8.5-billion a year, thanks, in part, to its value in holding government to account and in spurring innovation in the economy.

As the benefits of open government data become more widely accepted, Canada is falling behind many of its peer countries in making use of the stuff. Ireland publishes a comprehensive biennial data set on the well-being of children; Denmark tracks every aspect of gender equality; Britain breaks down many social-welfare indicators by ethnicity; and Australia publishes national workplace-injury rates – none of which can be said of Canada.

But no country throws our data failures into starker relief than does the United States. You might expect our southern neighbours to be data laggards: After all, theirs is a country that tends to prefer small government and emphasize individual rights over the common good.

Instead, Americans are world leaders at gathering and sharing an abundance of national numbers. "The U.S. has awesome data on almost everything,” says Jennifer Winter, director of energy and the environment at the University of Calgary school of public policy.

Open this photo in gallery

An envelope contains a 2018 U.S. census letter mailed to an American resident as part of the nation's test run for the 2020 census.

MICHELLE R. SMITH/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some attribute U.S. public-data excellence to the country’s (small-r) republican form of government, which treats government property as the people’s. But it’s not just a question of national DNA. The United States has made strides in recent years as a result of deliberate government policy.

In 2013, then-president Barack Obama signed an executive order making government data open and machine-readable by default – a move which, remarkably, Donald Trump signed into law just this month after being presented with a bipartisan bill giving Congressional approval to the broad strokes of president Obama’s order.

During his tenure, Mr. Obama also hired Silicon Valley whiz D.J. Patil as the country’s chief data scientist. Mr. Patil’s marching orders: to free up more of the information that had been mouldering, unseen and unused, in federal government vaults. He realized, in short, that the country could solve more of its problems if it had more eyeballs trying to identify them. “Through these data sets, you get brilliant insights,” he says. “We’re harnessing the power of the country's entire knowledge base.” Embedded in Mr. Obama’s health-care law, meanwhile, was a sunshine list for payments made by drug companies to doctors. The data helped reveal some chastening facts. Among them: The more money the average doctor receives from opioid makers, the likelier she is to prescribe opioids; and even such small gifts as a single meal tend to tilt doctors toward prescribing more expensive brand-name drugs.

That analysis would not be possible in Canada; the numbers aren’t there. (Under its previous Liberal government, Ontario was on the verge of forcing pharma-payment disclosure, but the program has been put on hold by Doug Ford’s Conservatives.)

A disarming number of people who have spent time thinking about the problem come to the same conclusion about why this is: Yes, federalism creates data silos, and yes, Statscan is too risk-averse and cash poor, and yes, provinces and federal departments have a built-in incentive to keep their failures hidden with data blackouts. But maybe, just maybe, the problem has even deeper cultural roots. Maybe we’re just not curious enough about what goes on within our borders – blissful in our ignorance. Maybe, these people suggest, the problem comes down to Canadian complacency.

In the meantime, Canadian public data remains full of lapses, hesitations and holes – for things as basic as average wait times for mental-health services and the number of homeless people who die on our streets. And the data we have is often so hard to access, it might as well be hidden. Even Mr. Arora knows the dangers of asking the country to fly blind this way: “There could come a day when the population says, ‘You had access to all of these data stores and you could have reasonably used it to prevent something nasty from happening. Why didn’t you?’ ”

The Globe and Mail has uncovered myriad data deficits, culled from dozens of interviews, research reports, government documents, international searches and feedback from our own newsroom. They provide a list of 28 data gaps which include all related statistics to inform why Canada has a homeless crises, an opiod crises, an indigenous residential crises, a broken incarceration system and a broken shelter system, long waits for mental health care and many more.

You are invited by the Globe and Mail to participate in their ongoing investigation into what dada Canada is in the dark on. Add your question to what data is missing that you want investigated and view the full article at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-in-the-dark-the-cost-of-canadas-data-deficit/