Enhancing Canada’s statistics on securities

The last global financial crisis revealed some important data gaps in countries’ statistics to properly assess the build-up of risk and the interconnectedness in financial markets. These gaps have led to the development of a series of initiatives at the international level with clear deliverables to enhance the quality of the information produced by countries in the area of financial investment statistics, including statistics on securities. The initiative undertaken at Statistics Canada to enhance securities statistics has produced many benefits with important expansions in terms of additional characteristics of instruments issued and held by Canadians, additional sector details as well as increased frequency and timeliness.