ABSTRACT
The American Statistical Association (ASA) was created in 1839, and for many years was one of the key professional associations for Canadian statisticians. For much of its early history and into the 1930s, the ASA and its Journal were dominated by a focus on economic and other forms of official statistics. Thus it was fitting that Robert H. Coats, the Dominion Statistician and an economist by training (BA 1896 Toronto), became the first Canadian president of the ASA in 1938. By the time of the creation of two statistical societies in Canada in the 1970s, later merged to form the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), and a separate Canadian Journal of Statistics, academic statistics in Canada had come into its own. Bellhouse and Genest (1999) describe some of these activities. Nonetheless, the influence of the US on statistics in Canada has been deep and long-lasting. Well into the 1960s and beyond, many Canadian statisticians received their graduate training in the US and returned for the greater benefit of Canada, while others stayed in the US, enhancing Canada’s reputation for the quality of its exports. Here we examine how statistics grew as a discipline in Canada up to about 1970 through the training of statisticians and the external influence, mainly American, on
that growth. Those who returned developed or enhanced statistics groups and academic programs at Canadian universities.
