Over the years, despite my attempts to assimilate into the American melting pot, the pronunciation of certain words betrays my heritage. No one whose first language is Canadian can say the word “out” without evoking a barely concealed snicker from most Americans. Eh? has been thoroughly expunged from my vocabulary, but for the life of me I cannot pronounce “out” correctly.
So, after many years of being periodically harangued by our channel partners for data for Canada, we have finally acquiesced. We are delighted to formally announce the availability of four datasets for Canada – demographics, consumer expenditures, wealth and – coming soon – detailed employment.
Not that we did this on our own.
We have partnered with Exceed Analysis, a location analytics firm hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba. The founder, Gary Warkentine, is quite possibly the best thing to come snowmobiling out of the northern plains since The Guess Who in the 1960’s.
AGS’s data products will be finding their way into Exceed’s flagship product Strata, and at the same time, Exceed’s data products are being offered to end users through the AGS channel partner network and are available through our Snapshot API engine. See the accompanying article introducing Exceed to find out more about them.
Most of our channel partners focus primarily on the US market and will on occasion venture north of the border when a client requires it. Because we are great proponents of education, we thought a brief review of the data environment to the north might be appropriate here….
On the census geography side, the most detailed published level “dissemination area” is the block group equivalent, but about half the size in terms of population. Because they are smaller, the codes are shorter at 8 digits rather than 12. Trust me on this one.
The nearest to a county level is called a Census Division, but just like ours, there are counties only in some places. In other areas, these are just the products of fertile statistical minds. We often think that Wisconsin is the undisputed champion in funky place names. But you would be sadly mistaken.
Ecum Secum. Moose Jaw. Saint-Louis-du-Ha!Ha! Witless Bay.
Armed with a plethora of glorious names to work with, it is inexplicable that the otherwise edgy wizards in the StatsCan geography division came up with such memorable gems as “Alberta Division 4” and the justifiably famous “Newfoundland and Labrador Division 7”.
On the postal side, the postal code is exactly like a ZIP+4. Except that few self-respecting Americans know the +4 part of their address, while every Canadian knows their full postal code. My last postal code in Canada, circa 1991, was L1T3B2. I’m almost sure that I have a +4 but have never bothered to look it up. Basically, Canada Post are unrepentant bullies who refuse to deliver your mail without a postcode. Brilliant strategy that worked.
Measurements are in that funny metric system that is encountered on rare highway signs – we had one in town here for years on the north US 101 that read “San Francisco 399 km” until some trucker decided to forcibly remove it. For history buffs, in the early 1970’s, Nixon and Trudeau got together and said something like “Hey, the whole world is going to this goofy French metric system. Do you think we should do it?” Like the two kids counting to three before jumping off the 30’ diving board, Trudeau jumped while Nixon got hauled off to the principal’s office. So, the metric system conversion was abruptly halted, except for random signs on US and Interstate highways. The sign? It lay broken at the side of the highway for years and was never replaced.
But seriously, over the coming months, we will be tackling some important issues in using data across international borders, even between two countries with a common heritage and a very long shared border. We will also be talking about privacy issues and the approach with Canada has taken for several decades – and the approach that the US census bureau is going to take moving forward.
So, stay tuned, eh?
North America Generalized Population Density
Montreal Linguistic Isolation
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