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Re: Free US Census data leads to analysis

Posted by Judyth Mermelstein on Nov 12, 2008; 8:17pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/Re-Free-US-Census-data-leads-to-analysis-tp1406.html

"Tracey P. Lauriault" <[hidden email]> wrote:

>[...]
>Has anyone seen in the private media the breakdown of the Canadian vote by
>electoral district and a discussion of who lives there?
>
>Have you noticed the silences in blogs about organizing and stategizing
>around certain demographic groups, the pattern of the vote and etc.?
>
>Have you read in Canada about the anglophone vote, Haitian vote, Chinese
>vote, aboriginal vote, eastern European vote, youth vote, poor vote, rich
>vote, senior's vote, womyn's vote, men's vote, etc.?
>
>Well we cannot even imagine having that conversation because our public data
>are locked up in the deep lurkium dbases of Statistics Canada, while our
>public electoral maps are locked up, funny, also in the same dbase, and the
>key to all of these are the Cost Recovery Price!

I'm enough of a dinosaur to look for my election information in print as well as online so I did see the breakdown of votes by electoral district in the Montreal Gazette, as well as various articles before and after dealing with specific cultural communities. The CBC provided reasonable television coverage of political parties targetting specific ethnic or other demographic groups.

Much as I agree with the idea that ideally this information should be available online as soon as it is gathered, and presented creatively in ways that make sense to the public, StatsCan has very little to do with this particular problem. They don't do exit polls broken down by ethnicity.

The strategizing and organizing by political parties is considered the property of those parties, and it's not the kind of information politicians want shared with the public. One of the obvious jobs of *journalists* during an election campaign is to watch what the parties are actually doing in various ridings and to report on things like tailoring messages differently when speaking to different demographic groups. Personally, I'd be happier if more journalists (including journalist-bloggers) were out in the field tracking these things rather than riding the leaders' campaign trails and reporting what the parties want them to.

Meanwhile, Canada is not yet at the degree of connectedness where all voters will self-report with their ethnic data, etc. on the Web. Some will, of course, in their own blogs or by commenting on blogs or forums, but most won't -- and wouldn't necessarily tell pollsters anything either.

Meanwhile, too, politicians aren't usually too happy about citizens scrutinizing electoral districting: it becomes too obvious that riding boundaries are gerrymandered. For example, in Quebec, if a voter in the Gaspé counts as one vote, a voter in an urban riding like mine (Jeanne Le Ber) only counts as 2/3. Politicians like to do this with the poorer urban ridings where people are more likely to vote against them for their past records and agitate for change than vote for them by tradition or because somebody's promised to build yet another road to nowhere.

>How are we to imagine our country in all its diversity if we are not even
>allowed to make pictures that tell us part of our story?  These last two
>elections - back to back - made obvious the real cost to locked up data - a
>collective national ignorance!

Well, the old-fashioned way to "imagine our country in all its diversity" was the CBC (radio as well as TV) which made a point of telling all its listeners about what was happening in every region, and the relative cheapness and ease of travel by rail or road within most of Canada. The former has been pretty much gutted -- regional production shut down, fewer reporters outside Toronto, decisions to market to different demographics in imitation of commercial broadcasters, etc. -- and the reach of rail travel practically eliminated without reflecting on the consequences of fossil fuel price-increases when everyone is dependent on personal cars to get around.

>I have been reading blogs about Proposition 8 (same sex marriage) vote in
>the US, the demographic breakdown of those results, and was drooling over
>the visuals i watched on election night.  Seems to me, the data, the
>infrastructure and the pictures can help us have a conversation about
>sameness and differences.  Canada however remains silent!

Maybe it's just me but I'm not convinced pretty graphics make up for the lack of understanding of real events. No matter how many times I see those coloured maps and pie charts, I can't forget that polarizing states into "red" and "blue" visually gives the totally false impression that the populations of those states are fairly homogeneous -- which is rarely the case -- and the thinner slices of "pie" represent people who don't really matter.

To me, it's worth looking at a riding like Jeanne Le Ber and asking *why* it voted strongly for the Bloc Québecois in the past two elections, when it was a "safe" riding for the Liberals before that. Hint: it has little to do with the "sponsorship scandal" issue which is all anyone talked about in the media, and a great deal to do with truly lousy representation of the constituency in recent years, though in the Neverendum Referendum era the voters felt obliged to support the Liberals to keep the country together and the local economy from collapsing further.

That's not something pollsters are normally paid to look at (in fact, you could argue they're usually hired to elicit particular answers to politically-expedient questions) and therefore you don't have the data with which to make a meaningful graph. The same is no doubt true of at least a hundred other ridings around the country. The parties themselves try to gather and analyze the information but keep it under wraps as much as they can because it's needed for the next round of strategic manoeuvres.

The government in power is not an impartial body dedicated to full public disclosure: it's a political party with a strong interest in keeping the public ignorant of how elections are really won. Elections Canada rules can only go so far and mainly look at financing. not cultural and political matters. Statistics Canada can report on demographics without voting information; Elections Canada can report voting patterns but has no access to demographic breakdowns; polling companies survey only what politicians or media types are interested in knowing, and then having published or suppressed depending on the circumstances. The question then is who can collect the data we would like to have graphed, and how meaningful would it be really to know that 36% of Indonesian Canadians voted NDP or whatever?

Seems to me the big news about California's Proposition 8 vote was the $200 million the Mormons spent to help get it passed and I got that from an e-mailed report, not a blog or graphic. My next question is, when will anyone be willing to spend that kind of money on public-data-collection instead of lobbying and advertising?
Just wondering ...

Anyway, I'm with Bob Gibson <[hidden email]>:
>Because it must affect the efficacy of advocacy groups across the spectrum,
>if there were a way to consolidate their wish lists, abolition of CC might
>make its way into the government mindset just because it is so unanimous.
>Like closing Guantanamo. Is there such a thing: an umbrella/consolidation of
>Canadian advocacy groups' wishlists? If there ain't, there should be!

Judyth

--
N.B.  I am off-line much of the time these days: please
phone if you need me urgently, and bear with me if less
urgent matters take a while to resolve.
##################################
Judyth Mermelstein   "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, QC         <[hidden email]>
Canada H4G 1J4       <[hidden email]>
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"A word to the wise is sufficient. For others, use more."
"Un mot suffit aux sages; pour les autres, il en faut plus."