Anil Arora — 2025 Testimonial Dinner Award Honouree

“In the post-truth society, we must double down and triple down on all the things that we need to know. We need a source of truth. We need a source of well-researched facts. We need a system that doesn’t just serve itself but serves society.”

Statistics Canada was a “burning platform” when he was appointed chief statistician of the federal organization in 2016, says Anil Arora. Two of his predecessors had resigned out of protest, one after the other.

Munir Sheikh resigned in 2010 when the Harper government made the long-form census voluntary. (The mandatory long-form census was reinstated in 2016.) Six years later, Wayne Smith resigned over the migration of StatCan’s IT services to a shared system, which many feared would compromise the confidentiality of key data and represented an encroachment on the agency’s independence.

“So, I certainly wasn’t going to go in there only to resign the next day,” Arora says with a laugh. “It was about, ‘How do we make this work?’”

Over the next eight years at the helm, Arora oversaw many changes to strengthen the agency’s governance, modernize and increase its independence with the establishment of the Canadian Statistics Advisory Council.

“We experimented. We tried things.” There were failures. In 2018, a pilot project to obtain personal banking records of a randomly selected group of 500,000 Canadians was met with an outcry over privacy. It was shelved. But he retired earlier this year with a list of significant accomplishments.

Among them was the migration of assets to the secure cloud, the first of that scale and scope in the Government of Canada. Another was the AgZero project, which uses alternative data sources and advanced technologies such as satellite imagery to reduce the time required of farmers to answer surveys to as close as possible to zero by 2026.

He also managed the department through the COVID-19 pandemic, a nightmare for statistical agencies that rely on finely tuned processes and often field work to compile their reports.

Arora’s advantage was a deep knowledge of StatCan, not only of its processes but also of the people. He started working for the agency in 1988 in Edmonton, where he had immigrated at age 11 with his parents and two younger siblings from India. A self-described “accidental statistician,” he had worked for a few years in the oil and gas sector after graduating from the University of Alberta. “But the economy of the day decided where I was going to go.”

He changed career paths to computer science, helping StatCan initially with computer-assisted interviewing and the early use of email. “I always had this keen sense of looking at opportunities no matter what I did. It involves curiosity and a sort of skeptical look at the status quo.”

He worked his way up the ranks, earmarked as someone with innovative ideas and an appetite for change. He moved to Ottawa in 1997 to be at the centre of operations and, in 2006, he oversaw the most comprehensive redesign of the census into an online questionnaire.

Asked what he loves about data, he describes it as “the GPS of your day.”

“From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, you are being — in some sense or another — bombarded with this information that guides you. So that’s the calling: to make sure that it’s as accurate as it can be; to make sure that it is reflective of what is truly happening in society.”

Founded in 1918 as the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Statistics Canada is highly regarded around the world. “There’s this accountability and responsibility to the institution and to Canadians,” he explains of his time with the agency. “We comprise 0.5 percent of the world’s population. And we have the ninth largest economy in the world. Think about that. We have to have a sophisticated information [and] statistical system because we have to punch above our weight. We have to make smart decisions based on good information.”

In pursuit of understanding the most useful information, Arora left StatCan the first time in 2010 to serve as assistant deputy minister for Natural Resources Canada and later Health Canada. “It was a view of saying, ‘OK, look, I’ve been in the kitchen creating these statistical cuisines. And I wonder what they taste like.’ So, I got a chance to actually use a lot of the evidence and the data and actually supplement my knowledge.”

“From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, you are being — in some sense or another — bombarded with this information that guides you. So that’s the calling: to make sure that it’s as accurate as it can be; to make sure that it is reflective of what is truly happening in society.”

Policy decisions take many things into consideration. “Clearly, if the data and the evidence were going to make the decision, you wouldn’t need any other organization other than Statistics Canada.” But there are other skill sets and perspectives that consider things like stakeholder, legal and political needs, as well as interjurisdictional issues, he says.

The pandemic in 2020 was his greatest challenge and the perfect opportunity for innovation. “I remember the famous meeting [before lockdown] we had in March when everybody said, ‘OK, we don’t know when we’re going to come back. What should we do?’ … It was the perfect excuse not to do anything. … But as a team, we said, ‘No, this is a time to be helpful.’”

The pandemic actually accelerated many of their modernization efforts, he explains. To focus and regroup under remote working conditions, they reduced their programs from 450 different surveys to 22 critical ones. By the summer, they returned to full operation with additional metrics and publications. “Flash estimates” every month helped track corporate activity and lockdowns, as well as giving early indications on metrics such as gross domestic product and retail sales. They geared up for the 2021 census, offered online, which enjoyed response rates above 95 percent.

Partnering with municipalities and Health Canada, StatCan introduced wastewater information as a tracking method for COVID. When Arora was at Health Canada, he had seen experimentation with wastewater sampling for tracing antibiotics in the system. Then in 2017, during a discussion about cannabis decriminalization, he used it again in addition to an anonymous crowdsourcing project to measure how much cannabis was being consumed — at that time, illegally. Why not use it for COVID?

Innovation and alternate data sources are key. In the post-truth world, the need for good information that people trust is more important than ever. Studies show more than 88 percent of Canadians trust StatCan.

“There are people and platforms that are designed specifically to misinform and disinform people. The speed at which these things are now propagating is just incredible. Data gaps now are dangerous because when there is a data gap, there are plenty of people filling that data gap with the view of what they think.”

Currently chair of the OECD committee on statistics and statistical policy, vice-chair of the bureau for the Conference of European Statisticians, and chair of the High-Level Group on the Modernisation of Official Statistics (under the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe), Arora is also an adjunct lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, teaching digital governance and leadership in the public sector.

“The post-truth society gives me the impetus to double down and triple down on all the things that we need to know. We need a source of truth. We need a source of well-researched facts. We need a system that doesn’t just serve itself but serves society. And we need to make sure that it remains strong, [so that] it remains enabled, legally and also ethically.”