This somehow escaped my attention – Canada is not included in the 2014 round of the World Values Survey. We’ve been included in every round since 2000. The assorted government departments that have previously provided funding were not able to do so this time due to cutbacks. (About $64,000.) This is quite a blow to those of us who teach with – and learn from! – data. More here and here.
According to a Globe and Mail article, the Conservative government has had to sharply revise its job vacancy numbers after dropping data based on anonymous postings on sites such as Kijiji. The Kijiji posts included overcounting due to the same job being reposted in multiple areas of the site. After the revision, the official vacancy rate fell from 4% to 1.5%.
The Globe and Mail noted that “the solution would be to give Statistics Canada more money to improve its research on job vacancies, which are based on surveys of employers.”
Thanks to Wendy Watkins for posting this to the CAPDU list!
Or at least, less bad than it was: Library and Archives Canada has withdrawn its unpleasantly stifling code of conduct and replaced it with one that is, well, less bad. Reported by the CAUT and brought to my attention by Kimberly Silk.Good to see that public pressure can occasionally have some impact.
Belated note : Industry Canada currently has a consultation paper up for comment – the paper’s outlining the update to the 2007 strategy outline, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. The last day to send your submission in is tomorrow.
There are… potential issues with the strategy this outlines, including a complete neglect of the public sector and the role of evidence (data!) in public policy. Evidence for Democracy has a good take on the issue, and a sample letter. Have a look and consider sending in a quick comment!
As this New York Times article points out, the U.S. jobs report for September is one immediate casualty of the government shutdown. The September report is merely delayed, however; the data has been collected and will be crunched and released eventually. More problematically for the long term, data is not being collected during the shutdown. If the shutdown lasts long enough, there may never be unemployment data for October, putting a permanent kink into the annual data for 2013 and into long-term adjustments.
A Times op-ed, The ShutDown’s Data Blackout (by a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics), looks at these effects and asks whether collection of government data should really be considered “nonessential”. It’s good to see the question being asked in a major news outlet. Data is not a frill. Perhaps the single most fundamental thing that governments do is make decisions. They need information to base those decisions on. That’s what it’s all about.
Sites I regularly use as a data librarian that are down:
Things that are available but not being updated:
The University of Wisconsin Data Library Service has a post with a more detailed list, and this post from data-insights.ca has some suggested alternatives.
Sorry for the belated note – yesterday was Evidence for Democracy Day: https://evidencefordemocracy.ca/ . While you may have missed the rallies, the site above lists a number of other ways you can still participate, including calling your MP, sending a message to MPs and party leaders, and tweeting about the issue.
Have a look at this article from the Hill Times: Voluntary census already damaging reliability of statistics, harm is ‘cumulative’.
“...we’re going to be getting further and further away from a point when we ever did have good information about what society looked like. The effect of bad information is cumulative, and it shows up in all kinds of policies.“
Thanks to Wendy Watkins for posting this to the CAPDU list!
CAPDU member Wendy Watkins was named a 2013 winner of the William H. Flanigan Award, together with Daniel C. Tsang. Read the full ICPSR announcement here.
Congratulations to both of them, and the other award winners!
Wanted to highlight a post from the site economicjustice.ca, Axed federal advisory web sites available on Archive.org, but not Library and Archives Canada. The vanished sites include the First Nations Statistical Institute, National Council of Welfare, and the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. See the economicjustice post for links and more details.
I’m quite unnerved by the increasingly ephemeral nature of what had been public government information. In the days when print information was routinely deposited in public and academic libraries, it would have been unthinkable for the government to later recall and shred those deposited items. Government document librarians would have been outraged.
Librarians, your documents are being shredded.
Edit: see also the datalibre.ca post Silencing the Archivists? Who does that? Canada does! for more on what is going on with Library and Archives Canada and why we need more outrage.
Interesting article on how the Toronto city government has decided not to use data from the NHS for planning purposes, deeming it too unreliable.
Favourite quote: on being asked if not being able to use census data will pose a problem, the head of the Social Research and Analysis unit responded “Only in the sense that the true indication of a neighbourhood outcome is how things change over time”.
Only?
Thanks to Tracey Lauriault for posting this to the CAPDU list!
CAPDU 