April 14, 2010

Which provinces dominate our public debates?

By Alison Loat

Yesterday I stumbled upon OpenParliament.ca, a fabulous new resource that does much to make Parliament more meaningfully public.

About a decade ago, when I was working with several hundred other Canadians on how cities can attract and retain young talent, one of our team members, a municipal employee, had hired someone to compare the number of times the words "urban" and "rural" were used in Parliamentary debate.  Yesterday, thanks to this, the analysis took me 20 seconds.

The answer?  Since 1994, "urban" was spoken 4,705 times.  "Rural" 12,454 times.

Recent proposals to create new ridings got me and others thinking about the role of MPs and related questions of representativeness in Parliament.  Just for fun, I checked out how many times various provinces and territories came up in public debate, and how that correlated to their relative populations.*

Quebec took the prize for the most-mentioned province, with 129,257 mentions, or approx. 51% of the total.*  23% of Canada's population resides in Quebec.  24% of Canada's MPs are from Quebec.  Their public mention-to-population difference is +28%.

Ontario is the second-most mentioned province, with 12% of the total (and with 39% of the population and 34% of the MPs).  Their public mention-to-population difference is -27%.

Here's how the others fared:

  • BC, 7% total words, 13% total population, 12% of MPs. Public mention-to-population difference (PMPD) -6%
  • AB, 5% words, 11% population, 9% MPs, PMPD -6%
  • SK, 5% words, 3% population, 5% MPs, PMPD +2%
  • MB, 4% words, 4% population, 5% MPs, PMPD 0%
  • NB, 3% words, 2% population, 3% MPs, PMPD +1%
  • NS, 4% words, 3% population, 4% MPs, PMPD +1%
  • PEI, 1% words, >1% population, 1% MPs, PMPD 0%
  • NL, 5% words, 2% population, 2% MPs, PMPD +3%
  • NU, 1% words, >1% population, >1% MPs, PMPD +1%
  • NWT, 1% words, >1% population, >1% MPs, PMPD +1%
  • YT, 2% words, >1% population, >1% MPs, PMPD +2%

The image is coming up wonky-ily here, but you can see this information in table form on the attached.

 

* See the attached spreadsheet for computations and assumptions.  There are a few caveats to the data.  All numbers rounded so totals will not all equal 100%. Population and MP data came from here.

provinces in H of C.xls (33.50 kb)

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Leo Miller

April 14, 2010 03:40 AM

Wow. Awesome and telling analysis. We're pretty screwed up, although it seems to come (mostly) at Ontario's expense - which is okay with me Smile

K Stricker

April 14, 2010 23:18 PM

This method of analysis is actually pretty flawed.  MP's might talk frequently about "rural Saskatchewan", but they're a heck of a lot more likely to talk about "Toronto" for instance than "urban Ontario".

Alison Loat

April 15, 2010 00:35 AM

Thanks Leo and K. for your comments.  

The method of analysis is simply a summary of a series of word searches in 15 years of House of Commons debate.  The risk, of course, is reading too much beyond that and drawing any firm conclusions.  

This is one small way of glimpsing at the aggregate public debate in a more accessible fashion than has ever been available before.  That's a good thing, and a trend in the right direction.  

Sites like openparliament.ca and other that allow for greater transparency make it possible to highlight trends in data more easily, but true knowledge and understanding always takes more than just data.  For example, we have no way of knowing from this analysis what context lay behind the words' usage (the search functionality doesn't allow for that yet).

For instance, Toronto was said about 12,000 times (about as many mentions as Alberta), Edmonton about 4200 times, Halifax about 4400 times and Calgary about 7,000 times.  Those are just the facts.  Many Ontario MPs are more likely to talk about their city or town than the province as a whole.  Who knows?  Any conclusions naturally require additional context.

K, one quick clarification.  I made the rural and urban point merely to show how much easier it is to do that kind of simple analysis today than it was 10 years ago.  Naturally all provinces have urban and rural elements, and you're right, rural probably more commonly used as an adjective.

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