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Colby Cosh: How long before Statistics Canada loses complete touch with the economy?

The national statistics agency's predictions are getting worse, even though data has never been easier to crunch

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Last month, when Statistics Canada delivered unexpected bad news about a second consecutive quarter of negative real-GDP growth, there was a frenzy of pooh-poohing and counter-pooh-poohing about whether Canada was really in recession. On Thursday CP’s Craig Lord called attention to a different angle on the whole fuss, which isn’t the notional recession (yet), but the forecasting failure that preceded it. Economists at the Desjardins credit-union consortium are warning that StatCan’s monthly economic estimates are growing wobbly, leading to larger retrospective revisions — i.e., bigger surprises — when quarterly and yearly data are released later.

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The Desjardins report (“Diagnosing the Data Quality Crisis”), authored by Randall Bartlett and L.J. Valencia, acknowledges that this is a........

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