The Canadian experience of building a privacy-responsible integrated statistical register infrastructure

Abstract

Statistics Canada has maintained statistical business and address registers for decades. Its Statistical Business Register is continuously being modernized to adapt to needs for more and more timely business and institutional statistics at lower levels of geography. The statistical address register is being replaced in 2022 by a Statistical Building Register that expands coverage to the non-residential building units and includes more attributes. Since 2016, Statistics Canada had also been investigating options to add a population component to this integrated system of registers. The organization settled in 2021 on a privacy-responsible population linkage infrastructure that is designed with privacy in mind from the onset. This paper presents how the privacy landscape has evolved and shaped the statistical register infrastructure in Canada. It also describes the Secure Infrastructure for Data Integration that will be elaborated to produce reference population files to support the production of statistical information for Canadians, and how it is entrenched in privacy principles.