Libs pick up on their own order paper question

Hey, Liberal Research Office, help yourselves to anything else you’d like on this blog.

Globe and Mail, Feb. 4:

“Following Haiti’s earthquake last year, rather than delivering aid as quickly as possible, the Conservative government wasted $27,000 on single-use backdrops, conveniently coloured Tory blue, when they were coordinating a response to the earthquake,” Liberal MP John McCallum told a news conference.

“To put that in context, it’s about 55 times the income of the average Haitian.”

This blog, Feb. 2:

According to recently released documents, the extravagant backdrops were used only once, when Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon hosted the Ministerial Preparatory Conference in Montreal on January 25, 2010.

The department paid $26,534 for the backdrop – about 55 times the average gross national product for a Haitian person.

The banners were rendered in Conservative Party colours – medium blue, with red highlights – and bore the slogan, “Strength in union.”

No OC Transpo API for you!

Ottawa software developers were excited when the city started allowing them to tap into OC Transpo’s server that tracks real-time bus location data.

Using the advanced programming interface — API— to tap into the GPS data, coders were busy creating new mobile and web-based applications that would tell users whether their bus was on-time. Several of these were entered in the City of Ottawa’s app4ottawa contest.

A few weeks back, however, the city suddenly shut down access to the data. Word at the time was that this was a temporary development, just a pause to work out some of the kinks.

Not so, according to one city hall source, who tells me the city jumped the gun in opening up the API in the first place. OC Transpo has been developing their own application and is revamping the entire system used to track buses. There was a miscommunication between the city tech guys and the bus people, I’m told. The company wasn’t expecting the data to go online.

There were also concerns about liability, because OC Transpo had no control over how the apps used their data. If somebody on the way to the Civic Hospital for brain surgery missed their bus because of an app error, who to blame and who gets sued?

Further, the company apparently has hopes for commercial advantages from the app they are building — want an ad with that bus schedule? Whether this  data will ever be open is uncertain.

So, bad news for Ottawa’s burgeoning Open Data community.

The only bus data can get in the near term is archival, much like the 92 million GPS records I used for this story on OC Transpo reliability figures.

Maple Leafs syndrome afflicts Senators?

The Ottawa Senators are now 8 games into a losing streak, fans are moaning and calls to fire either the general manager or coach go unheeded by the owner.

So, one might assume, lousy hockey and annoyed fans should result in falling attendance, right?

Nope. Just as the Toronto Maple Leafs sell out every game despite chronic on-ice, futility, Senators supporters are expressing their discontent by… buying tickets.

In social science terms, there is a negative correlation between the team’s winning percentage and the attendance at home games. 

My crunch of the data shows it’s a pretty strong correlation, too — about .72, where 0 means no correlation at all, and 1 is a perfect correlation. The worse the team does, the more fans come out.

Graphic, please…

UPDATE: I’ve heard a lot of suggestions on why this might be the case. One of our sports guys at the Citizen dismissed this as old news, saying the team always knows that sales are better in the second half of the season.

I ran this theory through the numbers for this season and the previous five and it holds up, although not to the extent that would explain the current trend. On average, attendance is strongest in March, at an average of 19,798 and weakest in October, at 19,178.  As the above chart shows, the trough to peak difference in the current season rolling attendance average is about 1,677 — nearly three times the difference in the change seen over past season.

Also, some Twitter posts suggested this was a criticism — that I disapprove of fans turning out to support a bad team. I’m neutral on that point but it’s worth noting Ottawa sports fans have long been accused fair-weatherism. These data suggest just the opposite.

Another theory advanced, based on lots of anecdotal info, is that the corporations that buy season tickets to entertain clients start giving them away to employees when the team loses. These “real fans” are more likely to show up at the game, boosting attendance (but not sales) even if the team struggles.

Bandwidth lobbying wars

Look at just about any company with a dog in the fight over telecom issues, chances are you find high-paid lobbyists working in their corner.

The imbroglio over the CRTC decision on bandwidth caps for Internet providers is no different. 

Netflix,  which gobbles up bandwidth with its online movie distribution, has the most to gain from Industry Minister Tony Clement’s intervention in the file. No surprise, they “Lobby Up’ed” last month, bringing on Subrata Bhattacharjee from Heenan Blaikee’s Toronto office.

Communications reports filed on Thursday showed Bhattacharjee scored some ear-time with CRTC officials on the Netflix file, Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein among them.

Von Finckenstein told the industry committee this week that he was planning to review the bandwidth decision even before Clement went public Twitter with his intention to overturn it.

Bhattacharjee also filed comms reports for meetings on Netflix’s behalf with two Industry Canada ADMs and a DG.

So, nicely done, Subrata.

Meanwhile, on the other side, there’s been a bit of lobbying action from the cable cos.  Some of the heaviest hitters in the business last week mentioned Netflix in registration declarations on behalf of Shaw Communications. 

Geoff Norquay and Mike Robinson of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group are both on-board for Shaw and both include in their subject matter: “Over the top providers - ensure that services like Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV operate under the same regulatory system as broadcast distributors.”

This one ain’t over yet.

Vote like an Egyptian

The country watches unfolding events in Cairo but no one probably is as keenly interested as Egyptians living here.

A quick data crunch shoes that people of Egyptian origin tend to be overwhelming concentrated in Liberal ridings.  Even in Bloc-dominated Quebec, Egyptians tend to live primarily in allophone ridings that vote Liberal.

From Statistics Canada’s long-form 2006 census questions on ethic origin (20 per cent sample), these are the electoral districts with highest number of those who identified as Egyptian:

Strategic voting: What has it done for you lately?

Once again, opposition supporters are discussing strategic voting in the next election to keep Stephen Harper’s Conservatives out of government. The “Catch 22” theory advanced this time in the Georgia Strait follows the same logic that failed to defeat the Tories in 2008 and, in fact, left them with a strengthened minority government.

While the principle is sound, in reality, it doesn’t work.

The “Anyone But Conservatives” (ABC) campaign got oodles of ink last time, but voters didn’t buy in, as per this analysis I did on election night in 2008 (using the Mother of All Excel Spreasheets Paired With Live Data that I Couldn’t Get Working Until 9:30 p.m. And Nearly Died of Stress As the Votes Poured In).

The reason I think it doesn’t work is simply that Canadians take their votes seriously. They prefer to vote for someone they believe in, but who they know will lose, rather than hold their nose and vote for the winner.

Sort of admirable, that.

Calls to vote anyone-but-Tory fail dismally; Green vote enough to give Conservatives 16 seats, study shows

The Ottawa Citizen
Wed Oct 15 2008 
Page: A5 
Section: News
Byline: Glen McGregor
Source: The Ottawa Citizen


Despite calls to vote strategically against Conservatives, Canadian electors yesterday failed to cluster their support behind the candidates best positioned to defeat Tories, a Citizen analysis of voting results shows.

Fewer voters coalesced around the single strongest NDP, Bloc, Liberal or independent candidate in a riding than they did in the 2006 vote, helping pave the way to the Conservative victory, election returns show.

The splitting of votes among parties to the ideological left of the Tories was a factor in dozens of ridings, as the Liberals dropped 14 of the most closely contested seats they won in 2006.

The Green party again cleaved votes away from the NDP and Liberals and were on pace to take away enough votes to help elect Conservatives in 19 ridings.

Throughout this campaign, environmentalists called on voters to choose the candidate in their ridings with the best chance of beating the Conservative candidate. To protest the Harper government’s treatment of Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams exhorted Canadians to vote ABC — “Anyone But Conservatives.” On Facebook and other Internet sites, groups sprang up that allowed users to agree to swap their votes with people in other ridings in effort to block the Tories.

To measure the effectiveness of this strategic voting campaign, the Citizen calculated the concentration of the non-Conservative vote. If voters are split in a riding, the NDP, Liberals, Bloc and Green will share smaller chunks of votes not cast for Tories. But if the “ABC” vote is concentrated behind a single candidate, he or she would stand a better chance of winning.

In 2006, these candidates averaged 61 per cent of the non-Tory votes cast in their ridings. But that figure dropped to 58 per cent last night, suggesting voters never got behind the idea of pooling their votes strategically. Rather than stick to together, anti-Conservative voters scattered.

Even in ridings expected to be close, voters showed little signs of gathering behind one candidate.

In the last election, there were 48 ridings where the margin of victory was less than five per cent of valid votes. Environmental groups targeted these key ridings as ripe for strategic voting. In those ridings in 2006, the concentration of non-Tory votes ran at 57 per cent. Last night, that number fell to 56 per cent.

The result: the Tories were on course to pick up 27 of these seats, better than the 16 of the closely-contested ridings they won last time. The Liberals had won 23 of these seats last time, but staggered away with only 10.

Among these key ridings was that of Conservative Health Minister Tony Clement, who won his Parry Sound - Muskoka seat in 2006 by the slimmest of margins, only 48 votes. Last night, however, he was re-elected easily as the opposition votes were scattered between the NDP, Green and Liberal candidates.

Just as U.S. Democrats blamed Ralph Nader siphoning enough votes away from Al Gore to cost him Florida, the loss of “progressive” votes to the Green party was also a factor last night.

In 19 ridings last night, Tories were on their way to victory with margins lower than the number of votes cast for Green candidates. If all these Green voters had strategically voted for their NDP, Bloc or Liberal candidate, the Tories would have lost these ridings.

The loss of left-of-centre votes to the Greens will doubtless have some blaming the party for helping elect Conservatives.

But if the Greens had elected to not run candidates, it is unclear where their voters would have gone.

An EKOS Research poll conducted over three days ending Oct. 13 found that Green voters were by no means unanimous in their second choice of parties.

The NDP and Liberals were tied for second choice of 28 per cent of those intending to vote Green followed by the Bloc at eight per cent nationally — or about 41 per cent in Quebec — and the Conservatives at a surprisingly high 17 per cent.

By redistributing Green votes to the other parties in those proportions, a different picture emerges. This “Green shift” last night was projected to swing only six ridings away from the Tories to other parties.

Backdrops for Haiti! Government paid out thousands for banners to decorate ministerial conference

As Canadians dug into their pockets for donations to Haiti last year, the Department of Foreign Affairs spent nearly $27,000 on backdrops used at a ministerial conference to coordinate response to the earthquake.

According to recently released documents, the extravagant backdrops were used only once, when Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon hosted the Ministerial Preparatory Conference in Montreal on January 25, 2010.

The department paid $26,534 for the backdrop – about 55 times the average gross national product for a Haitian person.

The banners were rendered in Conservative Party colours – medium blue, with red highlights – and bore the slogan, “Strength in union.”

Details of the banner purchase were tabled by the government on Monday, in response to a question from Liberal MP John McCallum, who asked about all banner purchases government-wide.

These were just a few of photo backdrops purchased by the department last year.  It also spent another $91,000 on banners for the G8 and G20 events in Gatineau, Toronto and the Muskokas.

Tories still mum on who pays for Harper’s hair and make-up lady

From responses tabled Monday to order paper questions….

Hon. Shawn Murphy:

    With respect to persons who have accompanied the Prime Minister on foreign and domestic trips, for the period January 1, 2006 to October 11, 2010: (a) in what capacity does image consultant Michelle Muntean travel on transportation provided by the government; (b) does Ms. Muntean receive any remuneration from the government; (c) on what trips did Ms. Muntean travel with the Prime Minister; (d) what was the total cost associated with Ms. Muntean’s travel, broken down by the amount spent on (i) transportation, (ii) accommodations, (iii) per diems, (iv) meals, (v) all other expenses; (e) which government department or agency paid for expenses incurred as a result of Ms. Muntean’s travel; (f) have any outside individuals, groups or organizations paid for any of Ms. Muntean’s travel expenses; (g) what bills have been sent to individuals, groups or organizations for Ms. Muntean’s travel expenses; (h) what are the names of the individuals, other than Ms. Muntean, not employed by the government, excluding the Prime Minister’s spouse and children, who have accompanied the Prime Minister on domestic or foreign travel; (i) in what capacity did the individuals in (h) travel on transportation provided by the government; (j) on what trips have the individuals in (h) traveled with the Prime Minister; (k) for the individuals in (h), what was the total cost associated with their travel, broken down by the amount spent on (i) transportation, (ii) accommodations, (iii) per diems, (iv) meals, (v) all other expenses; (l) which government department or agency paid for the expenses in (k); (m) have any outside individuals, groups or organizations paid for any of the travel expenses in (k); and (n) what bills have been sent to the individuals, groups or organizations in (m)?

Mrs. Sylvie Boucher (Parliamentary Secretary for Status of Women, CPC):

    Mr. Speaker, the Privy Council Office has no records or information on travel expenses for non-government individuals between January 1, 2006 and October 11, 2010.

UPDATE: Anyone else find it weird that this went to the parl sec for Status of Women to answer?

Beer and cigarettes: Does the REAL Scott Reid know about this?

An email from Conservative MP Scott Reid`s office circulated today on Parliament Hill:

De : Reid, Scott - M.P
Envoyé : 1 février 2011 10:57
À : - BQ: ADJOINTS; - BQ DÉPUTÉS/MEMBERS; - BLOC: COMMUNICATION; - BLOC: ADMINISTRATION; - INDEPENDENT MEMBERS/DÉPUTÉS INDÉPENDANTS; - LIBERAL ASSISTANTS; - LIBERAL MEMBERS/DÉPUTÉS; - LIBERAL OPPOSITION LEADER/CHEF DE L’OPPOSITION LIBÉRALE; - LIBERAL RESEARCH BUREAU; - NDP CAUCUS SERVICES; - NDP/NPD ASSISTANTS; - NDP MEMBERS/DÉPUTÉS NPD
Objet : Amazing Xerox Top-Quality Printer Up For Grabs! Can’t Miss!

Hey!

 

We have a Xerox Phaser 6250 printer up for grabs.  This is a very expensive high-quality printer that includes all of the toner.  We also have 7 boxes of brand new toner for it, which is included.

http://www.office.xerox.com/printers/color-printers/phaser-6250/enus.html

 

We have gotten a lot of life out of it, so it is a seasoned machine, but it still prints.

 

For it, we will accept beer, cigarettes or your best offer.  Make an offer!  It is located in 440-C Centre Block. 

This is a private machine, not House property.

 

Thanks.

Webscraping Wikileaks

Now that it appears Wikileaks will continue to roll out its diplomatic cables into the foreseeable future, the challenge for journalists is to keep tabs on the enormous amount of data pouring out on a near-daily basis.

I just finished pulling together a Wikileaks webscraper for my colleagues at Postmedia. It’s a computer script, written in Python, that checks in on a Wikileaks mirror every ten minutes to see if there have been new cables posted. It then downloads the new stuff to a database on my own server. 

We’re really interested in only references to Canada or Canadians in the correspondence, so the script runs through a list of relevant keywords against the new cables. When it finds a match, it emails an alert to me, my editor and Postmedia’s Ottawa bureau with a link to the cable.

From there, it’s up to actual humans to read the cables and decide if they’re worth following up. Most, of course, are not. (I might turn this into a Twitter robot to crowdsource this part of the work.)

Webscraping is a powerful technology that I’m finding increasingly useful, especially in Canada, where sometimes it’s the only way to assemble a useable dataset of government records. Unlike the U.S., we have no open-data culture at the federal government level, unfortunately.

There are a few new web-based services that will do webscraping for you. Needlebase and Outwit Hub are two. I haven’t played with them yet but my colleague Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun tells me they tend to respect prohibitions against scraping in robots.txt files, which can be a problem.

No matter how good these pay-to-scrape services, they will never be as customizable as a home-brewed scraping script.

Yet another reason for journalists to learn to code.

(If there’s interest, I’ll do a talk on webscraping at the upcoming Canadian Association of Journalists convention in Ottawa in May).