Is Statistics Canada Actually Overcounting Canadians?
There may be tools we can use to fact check the official scorekeepers
As you might recall, Canadian banking analysts recently accused Statistics Canada of undercounting the country’s population. Specifically, they felt estimates of non-permanent resident totals missed nearly a million individuals who had remained in the country after their visas expired.
Given the pressures we’re experiencing on housing and public finances, it’s hugely important to at the very least have a good sense of how many of us there actually are. I don’t have access to any new spy satellite head counting technologies that’ll give me better numbers than the pros, but I might be able to find a useful economic proxy that could help us clear things up.
The other day, one of my sons directed my attention to how The Independent used food consumption statistics to claim that official UK population numbers aren’t even close to reality. I like the sound of that approach but the trick is finding the right proxy.
I first turned to household water consumption, figuring that, since we all need to drink, wash dishes, and take showers at roughly the same rates, water usage trends should accurately represent population changes. Well that didn’t end well. In fact, between 2009 and 2021 - years when everyone agrees the population rose - water consumption fell by more than 11 percent. Either Canadians are flushing the toilet less or we’ve been installing more efficient equipment. I’m kind of hoping it’s the latter.
Ok. So how about foods that are, for the most part, both produced and consumed domestically? (Remember: I’m trying to identify consumption patterns among people in Canada, so I want to avoid the complexities of international trade.)
Eggs would seem to fit our needs. The problem with eggs is that, between 2001 and 2024, disposition of eggs for home consumption dropped by nearly 50 percent. And eggs in shell per 100 layers through those years dropped by eight percent. On the other hand, Statistics Canada also reported that egg production between 2011 and 2021 increased from 645 million dozen to 848 million dozen.
What’s going on here? Perhaps traditional home consumption of shell eggs has decreased while overall egg consumption in Canada increased due to shifts towards the convenience of prepared foods. But either way, I don’t think eggs are a reliable answer to our question.
We could move up one generation above eggs and look at poultry. Between 2001 and 2023 total bird production grew steadily by 28 percent. During that time, Canada’s population grew by 33 percent. So even if poultry production is a reasonable proxy for population size, if anything, it would suggest that there are currently only 39.4 million people in Canada rather than Statistics Canada’s own figure of 41 million.
One more try.
This time we’ll go with monthly retail supermarket and other grocery retailers sales numbers. Between January 2017 (the earliest data available) and April 2024, retail sales in Canada grew 32 percent. Now, compared with the 13 percent growth in population over that time, that’s a significant change.
But it’s also meaningless, because we’re looking at dollar figures that weren’t inflation-adjusted. When I do adjust for the past years’ inflation, the actual sales growth rate drops to just seven percent - barely a half of Statistics Canada’s population growth rate. Assuming the official 2017 Q1 population number (36.3 million) was accurate, a seven percent growth since then would translate to around 38.9 million people today. That’s more or less in line with our poultry result.
So if anything, my economic “models” suggest that both Statistics Canada and the banking analysts were wrong. Canada doesn’t appear to be nearly as popular a destination as we would otherwise believe. Having said that, of course, I wouldn’t take my numbers too seriously. But I think this does nicely illustrate how complex large economies can get and how difficult it can be to fully understand what’s really going on - even for the pros.
Please do check out my brand new book, The Audit - Adventures in Canadian Policy: Data stories from the land that competence forgot:
In a very real sense, it is impossible to ever obtain a fully accurate count of people in Canada By way of illustration, one would think that an accurate count of people in prison is quite achievable. It's not. It is impossible because every day, throughout the day, there are people being admitted to prison and people being discharged. Statistics Canada Justice Statistics recognizes this, and reports average daily counts, or average monthly counts. On any given day, there are around 28,000 people in prison in Canada. Imagine trying to count the total number of people in Canada. Even trying to determine the total population using average daily count, or average monthly count, presents challenges that cannot be overcome.
It's too bad we haven't yet found a method estimating population indepent of gov data. I was just thinking it might be opposite of other places. Canadians may spend only very little time in Canada. I suspect there are a million 'canadians' actually living abroad who are only Canadian for various benefits.
I understand that citizenship doesn't equal residency, but who knows what people put down on their tax's.