Last week we went through the predictable ritual of whining about the Statistics Canada’s seeding intentions report. Almost every analyst says every year that StatsCan’s numbers are inaccurate, too old, or both, “but they’re all we have.”
They might not be something we have in the future, or not even be as good as they are today, depending on how the StatsCan cutbacks recently delivered get carried out. What’s going to be cut? What’s going to be farmed out to private providers? We don’t know yet. The government has just started the process and it’ll probably be a long one because unraveling or reducing government bureaucracies doesn’t tend to be easy or quick.
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The half dozen analysts I spoke with last week and Monday didn’t seem worried that crucial reports like the seeding intentions report would be weakened or abandoned. A couple thought StatsCan needed an overhaul and modernization anyway, so more could probably be done with less and provide better and faster data.
But I wonder if less popular and visible bits of StatsCan data collection will be reduced. It’s hard to cut spending and staff and not hurt service, as much as we’d all like to believe increased efficiency can make up for everything. It’s often not that easy to do. I was downsized once. It was neither fast nor cheap.
Market analysis depends on numbers – numbers and numbers and numbers. The fewer the numbers, the shallower the analysis. The older the numbers, the less useful the analysis. The smaller the survey or set of data collection points, the worse the analysis. So let’s all hope the federal government manages to downsize StatsCan without damaging the data collection everyone in market analysis relies upon. We might find our comfortable complaints of today were actually occuring during the “Good old days.”
