A new study on alcohol use collected but withheld data on Indigenous Canadians and randomly assigned binary respondents to Men and Women

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By Peter Shawn Taylor

Statistics Canada is tasked with collecting, collating and publishing accurate information about the Canadian experience. Things it shouldn’t do: hide information from the public and randomly distribute the data it collects. A recent Statistics Canada report does both.

In October, Statistics Canada released the results of a survey of the drinking habits of Canadians. “A snapshot of alcohol consumption levels in Canada” asked Canadians how much they had drunk in the previous seven days. According to the topline figure, not much.

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Fifty-four per cent of respondents said they hadn’t touched a drop in the previous week. Those who had taken a drink Statistics Canada placed in risk categories defined by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction. (In doing so, it ignored Ottawa’s “official” advice on alcohol consumption, but that’s another story). Fully 15 per cent of Canadians admitted to being in the “increasingly high risk” category of seven or more drinks per week.

Statistics Canada then sliced this information several different ways. By gender: men report drinking more than women, based on their relative share of “high-risk” drinking (19.3 per cent versus 11.1 per cent). By age: the biggest drinkers are 55-64-year-olds, with 17.4 per cent consuming at........

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