Article content continued

In early August, the jobs report said that only 200 full-time positions had been created in the previous month. The news came as an unhappy shock to analysts — it signalled underlying weakness in the economy — and led to a drop in the value of the Canadian dollar.

But the numbers were wrong. Statistics Canada issued a corrected labour survey report one week later, adding a whopping 42,000 jobs to its original estimate. An agency report said the mistake was due to human error that occurred when a new data processing system was introduced for the Labour Force Survey (ironically) as part of a $5-million investment in the program.

“It is absolutely not the case that there was any budget cutting that caused or contributed to this problem,” chief statistician Wayne Smith said in an interview this week. “It was strictly an error and a problem with our protocols for testing data that we’re going to fix.”

A similar problem occurred last summer when an error was discovered two days before the scheduled publication of data from the National Household Survey (NHS). StatsCan has never revealed the source of that error, which delayed release of NHS data by one month.

The miscues form part of an unhappy narrative at StatsCan that began in 2008 with a Conservative government initiative to cut costs by returning the agency to its “core” mandate; built with the elimination of the long form census; and continued through the 2012 budget, which imposed more budget cuts.