Results at a glance

In 2020–21, Statistics Canada made significant investments in modernizing its operations and developing the resourcefulness of its employees, enabling the agency to rapidly adapt to sudden changes in priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The demand for relevant and trustworthy data was never more urgent and essential to fulfill, both in helping Canadians respond to the crisis and in charting a path towards an inclusive and sustainable recovery.

Providing user-centric services

Statistics Canada provides timely, high-quality data to Canadians. During the COVID-19 pandemic, which dominated its agenda in 2020–21, the agency developed the following new methods and technology-based solutions:

• In April 2020, Statistics Canada pivoted to provide Canadians with crucial data about the impacts of the pandemic on employment, health, safety, business closures, consumption trends, immigration levels, interest rates and housing prices and provided evidence of the unequal impacts of the pandemic on diverse populations.
• As the pandemic disrupted Canadians’ way of life, municipalities requested more granular data to support local decision making. Building on the results of a pilot project with the City of Vancouver, Statistics Canada has established a partnership with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to produce more data broken down to the community level.

Developing leading-edge methods of data collection and integration

In 2020–21, Statistics Canada continued to invest in leading-edge methods of data collection, which included integrating more alternative data sources that went beyond the agency’s traditional survey-first approach. The methods below have reduced the time and effort required of Canadians to fill out surveys and have created opportunities to incorporate richer datasets into the agency’s products:

• Canadians had access to timely and relevant survey findings provided using innovative data collection methods such as crowdsourcing, which enabled Statistics Canada to publish its first-ever study of how Canadians experienced discrimination during the pandemic.
• Statistics Canada’s investments in data science and machine learning resulted in the development of artificial intelligence tools to help the Public Health Agency of Canada’s response to COVID-19. These tools enabled the development of data models aimed at helping to reduce transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 and to evaluate the impact of public health measures to determine the extent to which these measures should be eased to allow businesses and schools to reopen and social gatherings to resume.

Building statistical capacity and leadership

Statistics Canada is a leader in fostering data literacy and numeracy. In the middle of a pandemic, the agency continued to lead a whole-of-government approach by using data as a strategic asset to better serve Canadians, which included improving the data analysis skills of Government of Canada employees.

• The Data Science Network for the Federal Public Service was launched in 2020 with the goal of establishing a strategy to enable data science expertise to be shared across all orders of government and beyond.
• As part of the Government of Canada’s efforts to address gender gaps and systemic racism, Statistics Canada’s Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics gave more than 20 presentations on a diverse range of topics aimed at bringing fairness and inclusion to decisions that affect all the people in Canada.

Sharing and collaborating

Collaboration enabled Canadians to share data and use them to make evidence-based decisions about effective pandemic response.

• In partnership with Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada and other organizations, Statistics Canada developed a dashboard to track the supply and demand of personal protective equipment, forecast ventilator capacity, and automate the national COVID-19 vaccine supply tracker.
• The agency’s interviewers, who are specially trained to conduct high-volume survey-based interviews, were mobilized to provide surge capacity in contact tracing for the provinces and territories. By March 31, 2021, they had made the equivalent of 1.2 million 15-minute calls for contact tracing, conducting everything from daily health check-ins with Canadians to in-depth case investigations, while still juggling their ongoing survey collection duties.
• Together with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business group, Statistics Canada launched the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions within weeks of the pandemic’s first wave. The goal of this survey was to track the impact of the nationwide economic shutdown on the nation’s firms. The results of this survey were vital in providing the Government of Canada with the information it needed to design and implement emergency income-support programs that met the urgent needs of the moment.

Designing a modern and flexible workplace

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Canada, Statistics Canada’s employees quickly adapted to deliver timely and accurate data and insights in a rapidly changing environment.

• Statistics Canada led the Government of Canada in adopting cloud-based computing solutions during the pandemic to address the urgent need for advanced technology solutions in a digital and data-driven world.

For more information on Statistics Canada’s plans, priorities and results achieved, see the “Results: what we achieved” section of this report.