It appears, upon close study, that StatCan’s survey-driven approach to sector monitoring is losing touch with major areas of the Canadian economy. The numbers the agency collects from resource extraction, finance and government are as robust as they ever were. But there has been a collapse of reliability in the short-term numbers on manufacturing as well as retail and wholesale trade. One particular sentence in the Desjardins report leaps out at the data-conscious reader: “In the case of real retail trade specifically, the monthly sales data now provide no insight into the direction of the underlying monthly real GDP category.” I would underline this for my colleagues down the hall at the Financial Post: a data release that you snatch at like piranhas has, since the pandemic, become statistical noise.