This month on Mean, Median, Moose, we continue the tradition of presenting twelve data sets during the holiday season. As usual we’ll do one dataset for each province and territory, combining Nunavut and Northwest Territories into one to make it an even twelve.
Nunavut and Northwest TerritoriesFor Nunavut and Northwest Territories, we decided to see if we could get a flavor of what MPs in the house of commons talk about when referring to the territories. To do this we extracted all Hansard entries for the territory MPs as well as all the entries that mentioned the territories from 2002 to 2023. Doing basic word counts yielded bland results as most of spoken language (especially in the house of commons) is “filler” words – glue that sticks sentences together such as “the”, “to”, “and”, “of”, etc. Here’s an example of the top words for Nunavut for example:
| Word | Count | | the | 29,471 | | to | 17,581 | | and | 14,914 | | of | 14,885 | | in | 9,594 | | that | 7,727 | | a | 7,483 | | is | 7,401 | | for | 6,052 | | are | 4,725 |
Not very exciting. As such, we used a little code and a parts-of-speech tagger to extract all nouns from the data set instead. That tagger is what’s known as a “Brill tagger”. Without further adieu, here are some graphs. Nunavut first:
Some expected entries here. Like “Lori” and “Idlout” which is the name of the current sitting MP for Nunavut. But there are some other interesting items like “Uqaqtittiji” which is the Inuktitut word for “Speaker” – which the MP uses to address the speaker of the house – as it is done in the Nunavut legislature.
Here’s the one for the Northwest Territories:
Interesting differences here are the presence of “Oil” (207th on Nunavut’s list) and the NWT neighbor “Yukon” (202nd for Nunavut). Interestingly Quebec makes both territories’ top 50, but no other province does. The next province mentioned for NWT is Alberta – 85th in ranking. Nunavut is 56th on the NWT list while “Northwest” is 203rd on Nunavut’s list.
Newfoundland and Labrador For Newfoundand and Labrador, it is one of the provinces I have never been to and honestly probably one that I know the least about, so I made a post in r/newfoundland which seems to be one of the largest Newfoundland and Labrador communities on Reddit. I asked if there was some interesting data, or information that redditors would like explored. A number of comments beyond the standard economic and social datasets that we usually talk about came up, related to the genetic diversity (or not) of the region and stories like the Texas Vampires as one redditor pointed out. Exploring the high proportion of boil water advisories and how smaller communities in NFLD struggle to afford the equipment on their small tax bases. Being Newfoundland, fish stocks and Northern Cod fisheries; to the popularity of Talk Radio in NFLD (30% market share in 2007).
My chosen data set was the CLEAR Wild And Country Food In NL Database. This data comes from the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action and Research. This open database leverages research and historical reports to try and track what wild game and foraged foods that people have eaten in NFLD for 8,000 years! The database is cited with most entries have an academic or research study backing the location and type of food that was gathered and consumed.
New BrunswickI also reached out to the great r/newbrunswickcanada reddit community for their thoughts on interesting data, lots of great ideas (post is now deleted as I broke the advertising rule by linking to the podcast) – Oops!
Looking at Bilingualism as it is the only official bilingual province with the unique subdialect of Chiac French, a number of ideas around a recent neurological syndrome that had no identified cause, baby eels (elvers) production as an emerging fishing industry was suggested as well to exploring the regions indigenous Treaty of Peace and Friendship that covers the province; Bay of Fundy tides and many more ideas.
The question I landed on was how many people work for the Irving Group of Companies? The Irving Companies are family businesses, and are not publicly traded yet they cover a wide range of sectors and industries that has resulted in what some would say an unhealthy level of market control in critical sectors of a provincial economy. These companies have grown widely and are vertically integrated within sectors meaning that various companies operate as supply chain partners to one another. This means their pulp and paper mill used the Irving trucking company to move logs,
The result is the Irvings (Arthur and James) are 10th and 11th richest people in Canada and combine the family is 4th richest. These listings have some significant variation depending on the source as differing measures of wealth result in fluctuation list to list. A 2015 news series from the Maine Monitor looked at the Irvings influence and how they are one of the largest landowners in the state.
As for determining how many people work for the Irving Companies it is hard to get an exact number. As the companies are not publicly traded and therefore not required to disclose employee information.
For context in total the Province of New Brunswick at the time of the 2021 Census had a Labour Force of approximately 389,000 people. Depending on the reporting the Irvings employ anywhere from 15,000 or 20,000 to 1 in 12 New Brunswickers (32,000 people). These numbers also vary widely as trying to capture full vs part time staff in service sectors like gas stations; seasonal staff in forestry and shipping businesses; and contractors in other sectors makes it a challenge.
For context the Province of New Brunswick in 2020 Government Profile reported 39,146 permanent employees in the New Brunswick Public Service. Many of us have heard of one company towns but you could argue that New Brunswick is a one company province (not actually) but the closest I could find.
Thanks to the good people of the New Brunswick and Newfoundland & Labrador reddit communities for the ideas and I hope to come back to some of the other dataset in future episodes when I have more time to dig in.
Ontario As I live in Ontario, I figured I could find something interesting to talk about myself. For this, I am teasing a early xmas present I gave myself as I purchased a custom data set on income inequality for the Province for a 2024 project.
The map above illustrates by Census Dissemination area the change between 90/10 ratios between the 2016 and 2021 Censuses by interval count which means the same number of DA fall into each range. By comparing this gap we can see if the top and bottom of the income scale are moving together or further apart. As a result a negative number is actually a good thing,as the gap closed over time.
Withover 22,000 Census Dissemination Areas in Ontario the distribution of the ration change is highly concentrated with only a handful outliers which is to be expected. This dataset hasn’t been fully cleaned yet as there are several thousand non-comparable DAs where data is suppressed in either the 2016 or 2021 Census.
A far tighter mapping gives a view of this with the vast majority of Ontario seeing less than +/-1 change in ratio between 2016 and 2021.
This is somewhat surprising as COVID measures were still in place at the time of the 2021 Census, you would think those supports, which focused on the lower end of the income spectrum would narrow the income ratios more significantly.Looking at urban centres we do see more variation.
Toronto
Kitchener Waterloo Cambridge
London
British ColumbiaOne might think BC would have a great open data portal, but one would be wrong. The provincial data portal is sadly lackluster with few data sets available, and even fewer that are any fun. So, we decided to take a look at American data that intersects with BC – border crossing entry data from the US Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. BC currently has three border crossings with Alaska, which are Pleasant Camp BC – Dalton Cache AK, Fraser BC – Skagway AK, and Stewart BC – Hyder AK. While it appears Stewart BC – Hyder AK is currently open (fun fact side note: Hyder brands itself as “the friendliest ghost town in Alaska”!), no data is collected for Hyder since you aren’t actually required to report to anyone going into Hyder (just going into Canada, remember to report to the CBSA office or give them a call after hours)! So, that leaves the Pleasant Camp BC – Dalton Cache AK and Fraser BC – Skagway AK border crossings for data to examine.
The Bureau has an excellent interactive data table and dashboard to pull annual, monthly, and percentage change data from US border crossings and display data in charts or on a map. Taking a look at Dalton Cache AK and Skagway AK, Skagway is certainly much more popular, seeing 442,225 entries in 2023, while Dalton Cache only saw 50,173. While Skagway has gotten significantly more popular since the Bureau’s oldest available data in 1996, seeing a 74.8% increase in border crossing entries, Dalton Cache saw a 31.4% decrease. Skagway’s tourism people win, particularly as their bus and train passenger traffic is the main driver of the increase, seeing 154% and 270% increases, respectively. Meanwhile, Dalton Cache saw a 76% decrease in bus passenger crossing entries and a 100% decrease in pedestrian crossing entries. Trains have just never gone there.
See the above table for all the numbers, or check out the data tool yourself for more fun!
QuebecJust like every year, finding data in Quebec that’s not only in French can be difficult. However, this year we came across Hydro Quebec’s Open Data portal, which is surprisingly well done! Each data set contains a description, files, and a host of thoroughly explained additional information that makes using the data sets much easier than what you sometimes find on other open data portals.
Maybe the most fun data set Hydro Quebec has is its tree and shrub directory! This data set contains “all of Hydro‑Québec’s data on over 1,700 plant species and varieties found in Québec. The directory can be used to search for a tree or shrub based on specific features such as light requirements, hardiness zone, height at maturity, etc. Also, each plant species and variety is associated with a safe planting distance from medium‑voltage lines.” How cool is that! Now, this data set is the actual data that can be accessed through hyperlinks configured on an API; however, Hydro Quebec has a “Choose the Right Tree or Shrub” page where you can search the data as a user who might know nothing about APIs.
You can search by the name of species or variety of tree or shrub, or you can choose a plant type, safe planting distance, hardiness zone, shape, light requirements, height, solid humidity, and/or spread to find a tree or shrub that aligns with what you’re looking for. For fun, we entered that we were looking for a “deciduous” plant with a safe planning distance of “7.5m”, a hardiness zone of “2b”, a “creeping shrub” shape, “full sun” light requirements, and “average” soil humidity, and the search spit out the “common bearberry” and “garland flower” as shrubs that aligned with this criteria, as well as provided a full record for each with much more information about them. Definitely one of the more unique and useful data tools we’ve seen!
Saskatchewanhttps://andrewjdyck.substack.com/s/open-data-saskatchewan
Ah, Andy Dyck. You are our go-to Saskatchewan data guy, and while Katie didn’t want to put in her email address to access your (maybe outdated) Saskatchewan Open Data portal that we covered in our December 2020 holiday show, we see you did start a Substack in 2021 instead that doesn’t require an email, with three wonderful data sets with such intriguing names as, “Honey, I shrunk your discretionary income”, “Moe money, more problems”, and “Catching a killer in Saskatchewan from the sky”. We think we should invite you to our panel at this point, Andy. You’re practically one of us. The “mode” to our “mean, median, moose”.
Anyway, we took a look at his “Catching a killer” analysis piece about the murders on the James Smith Cree Nation in Northern Saskatchewan since that 2022 tragedy is one likely remembered across Canada, and we don’t often get to look at this type of analysis. After getting the emergency alert about the situation, Andy took to Reddit where he learned the RCMP had sent up a plane to circle above Regina looking for the suspects and their vehicle. Learning this, Andy dug deeper into what RCMP and municipal police were doing with aerial surveillance in the province and into public tracking of private and commercial aircraft. Andy used ADS-B signals transmitted by aircraft and the ADS-B Exchange interface to do this, tracking the Shock Trauma Air Rescue Services (STARS) helicopters that were deployed to help injured victims, the Saskatoon Police Plane, and RCMP planes around the province. See his post to see the planes in the image below actually moving along their flight paths!
Through this tracking, he was able to discern when the STARS helicopters were flying injured victims to hospitals and where and when surveillance was happening, producing crazy surveillance flight path images like the one below.
Pretty cool stuff, Andy! Thanks again for being our go-to Saskatchewan data guy, and just another shameless friendly reminder that we’d love to have you on the show.
YukonThe Yukon Open Data Portal is larger than you might think with over 3,000 data sets to choose from. One that caught our eye was a shape file containing the key wildlife areas for various animals found in the Yukon. Here’s a sample of the key wildlife areas we found in the data set:
There’s many more! Take a look at this Observable notebook where you can select your own animal and see their key habitats in the Yukon.
AlbertaFor a change of pace let’s look at songs about Alberta. To do this we found a website that allowed for lyrics searching (a free source of raw open data containing lyrics is actually quite difficult to find). For Alberta itself we found 306 songs containing Alberta. For a population of 4.3 million, that’s 71 songs per million. “Alberta” might be skewed here because of the blues standard “Alberta” about a woman named Alberta, not the province. Here’s the songs per million for the largest ten Alberta cities:
| City | Population (2021) | Lyric Mentions (Lyrics.com) | Mentions per Million | | Calgary | 1,306,784 | 262 | 200 | | Edmonton | 1,010,899 | 117 | 116 | | Red Deer | 100,844 | 7 | 69 | | Lethbridge | 98,406 | 6 | 61 | | Airdrie | 74,100 | 22 | 297 | | St. Albert | 68,232 | 4 | 59 | | Grande Prairie | 64,141 | 1 | 16 | | Medicine Hat | 63,271 | 5 | 79 | | Spruce Grove | 37,645 | 0 | 0 | | Leduc | 34,094 | 0 | 0 |
Airdrie blows it out of the park due to the John Prine song “Paradise” which references a “Airdrie Hill”. Unfortunately Airdrie Hill is located in Kentucky, not in the town on the outskirts of Calgary. The song has since been covered numerous times. Medicine Hat gets a more legitimate boost from the Guess Who hit “Running back to Saskatoon” which mentions Medicine Hat and has also been covered numerous times. Red Deer gets the same boost though. The lyrics are “Red Deer, Terrace and Medicine Hat, Sing another prairie tune”. If you like this kind of stuff, you might like Maclean’s article exploring the place names mentioned in Tragically Hip songs.
ManitobaWe’ve covered the City of Winnipeg’s portal before, when we reviewed open data portals in Canada. It’s an impressive repository of data and resources. Winnipeg’s commitment to transparency and accountability is visible in features like the open budget tool, an interactive dashboard that enables detailed exploration of capital spending in Winnipeg.
The Winnipeg portal contains over 1,200 datasets. It’s got the routine open data content that you expect from any municipal government portal: infrastructure shape files, 311 data and so on, and a whole lot more – the striking thing about this portal is the breadth and depth of the data available. Many municipalities are great at publishing the “easy” stuff but it shows a commitment to open data when Winnipeg does the work to expose data that’s probably a bit messier and tougher to cleanse and aggregate like freedom of information requests, incidents of reported illicit substance use, traffic counts, and so on.
For this edition of the podcast, we zeroed in on business license data provided by the City of Winnipeg. This data set includes, by category, the business licenses issued by the City of Winnipeg. The business name, its location and the status of the business and license are all included for each license. The series begins in 2020 and runs to the present day.
A data set like this might not seem particularly sexy but this kind of ground-level economic data can be used to illuminate trends in communities in real detail. It also comes with some challenges. This is a data set Winnipeg published on their own initiative – there is no Manitoba standard format for municipal reporting of business licenses. To utilize this data outside its original scope it is critical to understand what data is included and what data is not. The authors of the data may not have considered that.
The business license data set description identifies that it includes 15 categories of business that are licensed under the city’s Doing Business in Winnipeg bylaw. One of those categories is “rooming house,” a residential property that has been converted into a shared dwelling. The definition of a licensed rooming house in Winnipeg indicates that licenses are only required for this type of business if it was established prior to 1986, further stating that the legal regime makes it very difficult to establish a new rooming house business of this kind. Converting residential properties to rooming houses requires a complex, bedroom-by-bedroom approval process.
The current extent of licensed rooming houses by city ward in Winnipeg is illustrated on this map. The concentration of rooming houses presumably matches with municipal development patterns pre- and post-1986. This data set might be useful to help understand opportunities for expanding housing in Winnipeg, or it can be understood as a proxy for how land-use regulation has changed the complexion of the city as it has developed.
Nova ScotiaNova Scotia is recognized as a center of excellence in archival digitization, with 30 terabytes available online, representing 1.3 million of the 60 million records in the archives. They’ve got an online portal they call Transcribe that is an experiment in crowdsourcing. Anonymous members can visit the portal, see which documents have not been fully transcribed and get started transcribing. Doug tried it out and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart or those with vision problems – when transcribing, you’re looking at a photograph of an old document with all the idiosyncrasies of manually-produced text content. Users can attach their name to their transcriptions but it’s not mandatory, more for saving your place to come back to than tracking contributions.
Some of the results of this work have made it to the Nova Scotia Open Data Portal, including a data set called Death Registrations – 1970 Full Transcript, which includes demographic, geneological and cause-of-death data for the 6,764 people who died in Nova Scotia in 1970. The digital archive preserves some of the features of a handwritten data set – there are over two thousand individual values in the column for primary cause of death – so it’s got to be approached cautiously. I was curious about the distribution of age at death in this data set, and bucketing the ages is a pretty safe transformation that kept me away from interpretation. I thought it would be interesting to compare the distribution of age at death in 1970 against the age distribution of Nova Scotia deaths in 1991, so I took a look at Statistic’s Canada’s mortality data and compared the two.
Converting the absolute number of deaths in each year into a share of overall deaths within the 5-year age buckets used by Statistics Canada allows us to chart the change in distribution of age at death in Nova Scotia. Not surprisingly, child mortality was significantly reduced and many more people survived into their seventies.
We decided to take a chance and reach out to the good people at Nova Scotia Archives to see if they had any comments or other context about this interesting data set. They were very kind to reply:
While the birth, death and marriage records that we receive from Vital Stats come with some indexing they reflect a time period when electronic data was expensive, and the index was capped at a fixed number of characters for each. Thus place names and, in some cases, given names were often severely truncated to fit within the 32 spaces allowed for the index information. Our staff was able to adapt and extend the website coding to allow the public to enter data into the fields they saw displayed in the image of the actual record. In addition to enhancing the basic who, when and where about the birth, death or marriage information, the public were eager to add the ages of those married, their parents’ residence and occupations and numerous datapoints which were then added to the searchable record. Using the crowd sourced information, the Archives was able to enhance the data and its searchability to eventually allow our website users to discover information about midwives in the African Nova Scotian community or the number of marriages between military personal from away and Nova Scotians during the war years. We found the public was eager to help, but we also added some features to allow them to get directly to persons from identified communities or of a certain last name. This enhanced their interest and allowed quicker completion of the whole record.
– John MacLeod
PEIPrince Edward Island is a pretty small province! There are eight cities in Ontario with a population larger than the 156,947 recorded on Prince EdwDard Island in 2019. The capital city does not have an open data portal, though the federation of PEI municipalities has made some ambitious noises in that direction.
The PEI Open Data Portal is not a hotbed of digital activity. It contains 212 data sets across five categories: Education and Community, Environment and Food, Government and Economy, Health and Home and Transportation. Since 2020, only 26 datasets on the portal have received an update, and many of those are related to mandatory reporting under some federal regulation like the Highway Traffic Act. There are only a small number of data sets that are kept relatively up to date.
One interesting data set with a decently long series is the register of visits to historic sites in the province. Last updated at the beginning of 2020, this series goes back to 2004 and records visits to seven historic sites on the island that collectively make up the PEI Museum:
They all sound absolutely lovely and if you find yourself on PEI you should definitely visit them all. I used good old Excel to create a pivot table of the data, then did a bit of manipulation to produce this chart showing the aggregate count of visits to the museum, with each site represented by its own colour. Basin Head Fisheries museum is the overall winner, and it’s nifty to see that there’s a baseline level of interest in the Eptek Art and Culture Center that draws in visitors pretty consistently whether it’s tourist season or not. The Beaconsfield Historic House also seems durably attractive no matter the time of year. We’ll have to wait for a future update to see how COVID-19 affected visits to the museum.