Shoddy data hampers Canadian “hardest-place-to-live” study

The Mowat Institute attempted to produce an interactive map illustrating the worst places for poverty and inequality in Canada, but they found that Canadian data is so poor, vast areas of the map — shown in grey — had to be left blank.

The hardest place to live in Canada?

If you guessed Nunavut, you would have been right — but only maybe and not with a high degree of certainty.

That’s a finding from a somewhat uncertain study released May 7 by the Mowat Centre, an Ontario-based think tank located at the University of Toronto.

In it, they said the quality of data that Statistics Canada and other agencies are able to provide for small geographic sections of the country is poor to non-existent.

And they say one big reason for that is the Harper government’s decision in 2010 to eliminate the mandatory long-form census and replace it with the voluntary National Household Survey.

Statistics Canada used the NHS survey during the 2011 census — and the reliability of the data they gathered that year compares poorly with data gathered in the earlier mandatory long-form census.

This means that policy makers no longer have good information about social conditions and health status in many rural and remote areas of Canada, including Nunavut and the northern provincial regions like Nunavik and Labrador.

“Quite simply, it is very difficult in Canada to make useful, community-level comparisons across the country using survey data,” the Mowat Institute group said.

The research team had attempted to do a Canadian version of an interactive map the New York Times published in June 2014, entitled “Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S?”

Data captured by the United States census is so good, the New York Times team were able to compare 3,125 U.S counties.

They found the worst places to live in the U.S., based on six indicators, are four counties in Appalachian Kentucky, and six other counties in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Arkansas.

But the Mowat Institute’s attempt to do the same for Canada ran into some big problems.

For example, in health care, useable data was missing for many remote and rural areas.

“Only 95 of the [117] Health Regions had sufficiently reliable data across all nine of our indicators to be included in the analysis. This means that large swaths of Manitoba and Saskatchewan have been left blank in our map,” the Mowat Institute said.

Because of that problem, they shifted their focus to vital Canadian data and why it is missing.

“The result is poorer quality data and higher ‘suppression’ — the exclusion of data due to higher non-response rates. Non-respondents are also more likely to be individuals who face greater disadvantage, for example Canada’s Aboriginal people, and those who would benefit the most from the public services that census data could support,” the Mowat Institute group said.

That also means policy makers may lose touch with social problems in areas such as Nunavik and Labrador.

To fix the problem, they make four recommendations:

• reinstate the mandatory long-form census;

• expand the census to capture more health and social indicators;

• strengthen sharing of data among federal departments; and,

• create tools to make data more accessible and easier to share, such as common data formats, searchable online databases and open APIs (application programming interfaces).

The interactive map that the Mowat Institute was able to produce does show that the worst areas of Canada to live mostly include rural and remote areas such as Nunavut, Cape Breton, the south shore of Nova Scotia, the northern interior of British Columbia, northern New Brunswick and parts of northern Ontario.

But vast areas, including northern Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, as well as Labrador, are blank due to insufficient or unusable data.