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While we are at it, let’s discard the conspiracy theories about the government ordering up a better set of numbers than what was published Friday. No government would ever try something so ham-handed; all Statistics Canada would have to do is call a press conference and state that an attempt had been made to interfere with the data, and the government’s credibility would be destroyed.

Why is Statscan waiting to publish the correction, a source of widespread complaints in markets? The quixotic reference Statscan makes to a “processing” error suggests that the initial mistake may not have been the only potential error. “Processing” also implies the error was not in the raw data collected from its sample, but in how the raw data was processed into a publishable form (if processing sounds like a manufacturing process, that’s why Statscan is often called a numbers factory). The only thing more embarrassing to Statscan than admitting it made a mistake would be correcting an error, and then saying two days later that it found another mistake. At that point, you become fodder for late night TV humourists. While the mayor of Toronto might survive such ridicule, the reputation of a statistical agency would not.

It is also a reminder that there is a human element to all statistics. Every major data series published by Statscan at some point has had something similar happen — someone uses the wrong spreadsheet, forgets to check if all the responses are included, mindlessly inputs last month’s data for this month, the list of possible mistakes is a census of human imperfection. There is even a seasonal component to these errors — it is no coincidence that a similar event last August led Statscan to delay its release of national household survey data. People are on vacation in summer, and those on duty are simply not as vigilant as in other months.