Civic data

[Daniel Haran]

Dear Hon. Peter Van Loan, Minister for Democratic Reform,


I'm emailing you to make sure our government doesn't sue me.

Well, there's more. I ask that you to open up more civic data in
Canada, including postal code data. This would benefit taxpayers by
avoiding duplication in government departments. It would also avoid
the disgraceful practice of misleading some Canadians as to who their
elected representative is.

Let's start with the legal question. Is it illegal for me to copy a
list of members of parliament from parliament's website? I made a copy
after hearing a couple different (non-partisan) advocacy organizations
had staffers copy and paste the database from web pages into their
excel databases. You can find my list here:

http://lokobo.com:3000/mps

To import it into excel, you can obtain it as CSV:
http://lokobo.com:3000/mps.csv

Several people have told me that this constitutes copyright
infringement, although it seems to me a straightforward list of facts.

Once I had completed this list, I was asked for a function that
retrieves a member of parliament for a postal code. (More precisely,
something that returns a list of possible electoral districts ids for
a postal code.) You can see that function here:

http://lokobo.com:3000/

Is that illegal? Again, straightforward facts. I'm not even
redistributing a database or making any efforts to build an exhaustive
one.

Advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum use similar
tools. Egale, Preserve Marriage, CLC, United Steel Workers, Automotive
Industries Association's Consumer (Right to Repair campaign), Micah
Challenge, Make Poverty History, CAHPERD, The True Voice, CNIB, all
exhort supporters to "Contact your MP".

Some groups link to the parliament's website, others copy the
information. The richest buy data from Statistics Canada. If we care
about democracy, this information should be freely available to all. A
government that spends millions encouraging citizens to vote in media
campaigns can surely forgo a few thousands in licensing fees to make
it easier for citizens to express concerns on policy issues.

Besides the cost to democracy, there are a couple other points worth
considering.

-Elections Canada is not a customer of this product. They also buy a
file from Canada Post, a crown corporation, duplicating the costs of
development.

-The elections.ca website results seem less accurate than those on the
parliament's website (which I hope was obtained from StatsCan rather
than duplicated).

You can verify this for yourself by searching for 'H1T4C6' on
http://www.elections.ca/scripts/pss/FindED.aspx

and comparing it to:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/PostalCode.asp?Language=E&txtPostalCode=H1T4C6

Is it one or one of five possible MP's?

Making this data freely available in an open format is a great way to
ensure citizens are given accurate information, to increase
participation in our democratic process and reduce error-prone
bureaucratic duplication.

I have copied some of your colleagues, hoping they will support you in
changing policy on this matter before the next election is called.
When every political party has a function to find their candidate by
postal code, advocacy organizations should be entitled to the same.

Some of my colleagues want sites where a citizen could input their
postal code to find all candidates in their riding, along with their
programmes and other communications. It would be nice if we could do
that without the threat of litigation.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Daniel Haran.