After three days of crunching numbers and hunting down data, I reported the following earlier today:
Ridings represented by Liberal and NDP MPs are getting more than their fair share of a $2-billion federal infrastructure fund, suggests a new analysis by Canwest News Service.
Canwest's analysis of 310 infrastructure projects receiving funds from the Knowledge Infrastructure Program follows separate analyses by other news organizations of other infrastructure programs published last week that showed ridings held by Conservative MPs were receiving a disproportionately higher share.
But the analysis of the Knowledge Infrastructure Program grants shows that, nationally, ridings held by NDP MPs are getting more than twice what they would have got if the money was distributed based strictly on the number of seats each party holds.
In Quebec, ridings held by Liberals are also getting more than twice their fair share of KIP funds, while Conservative ridings have, so far, received just 1% of the nearly $250-million the federal government has given to colleges and universities in that province.
Analyses published last week of other infrastructure programs, such as the Recreational Infrastructure program prompted opposition politicians to accuse the federal Conservatives of playing partisan games with economic stimulus cash, a charge denied by the government.
The Canwest News Service analysis of Knowledge Infrastructure Program grants suggests the evidence supporting claims of partisan spending is less clear.
What is becoming clear, however, is the difficulty citizens, journalists, municipalities and others are having in learning how billions of dollars in federal infrastructure grants are being spent.
The Canwest analysis of Knowledge Infrastructure Program grants, like analyses published last week by the Ottawa Citizen, Halifax Chronicle-Herald and Globe and Mail, is based on an incomplete data set. [Do the read the whole thing, won't you?: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2143818#ixzz0UzgMOfMo ]
There's been a lot of reaction to this story (most of it on Twitter). Let me respond.
First of all: Here's the spreadsheet I used to come to the conclusions I made in this story. This data is pulled together after combing through about 200 different Web pages at Industry Canada's Web site. After doing that to obtain details on 310 spending announcements, I then matched up each spending announcement with an individual riding. That took a while because, for example, I had to figure out if the millions received by the Justice Institute of British Columbia was for its New Westminster campus or for its Maple Ridge campus. The NDP won New Westminster last fall but the Conservatives hold Maple Ridge. I used a variety of sources to match up each announcement with a riding. Of the 310 I found, I was unable to match one up with a riding and one other seemed to benefit more than one riding.
You, too, can pull this data together by starting here for English Canada: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/696.nsf/eng/h_00038.html and here for Quebec: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/696.nsf/eng/h_00023.html . Government sources pushed these URLs at me but that was all the 'help' they provided.
I should note: On Friday, the Prime Minister was in Quebec and announced that the Knowledge Infrastructure Program would fund an additional 88 projects in Quebec. Despite my request, Industry Canada would not provide details on these 88 projects so, since I could not map this spending to a specific riding, it was not included. But note: KIP is a $2 billion program and we have data about where $1.75 billion of that is being spent. When we learn of details for the remaining $250 million, it's unlikely to change the trend that much.
So with that, let's dive in to some of the Twitter reaction and my comment:
My good friend @kady was first in with some thoughtful comments:
fab datacrunching! makes me wonder tho, whether the UofA grant, for example, should be considered a 1-riding investment
My thoughts: New Democrat Linda Duncan is the lone non-CPC MP in Edmonton. If she stands up and starts telling people that the $60 million or so to be spent on new bricks and mortar at the University of Alberta in her riding is not a big deal, I will indeed eat my hat and recant this entire analysis. But something tells me that, even though the North Saskatchewan River is all that separates Duncan and the U of A from the Conservative hordes, I suspect Duncan will proudly claim the U of A as one of the jewels in her riding. Similarly, even though Yonge Street is all that separates Bob Rae from the University of Toronto, Olivia Chow will be quite pleased — as she should – to claim (most of) U of T for her own. So yes, I do believe that, from a political standpoint, these are one-riding investments. Economically, they're likely to be one-riding investments as well. That's because these are not operating grants or 'soft' grants. These are grants to repair, maintain, or improve facilities. They're construction projects. And whether your new building houses chemists or hockey players, the benefit is still the same: New construction industry jobs and construction jobs are, by definition, local jobs.
@greg_elmer, a fair database hound in his own right, had this:
@davidakin NDP and LIbs getting KIP because major universities are in ridings held by those parties, no? UBC, UoT, etc
And former Liberal MP and current Liberal candidate @OmarAlghabra had this:
… grant applies to campuses. genuinely curious: did every campus get a grant?
And @mattjuniper, summing up many objections says this:
Why are you missing key stat though? Proportion of qualifying institutions in ridings held by each party? Seems an obvious miss!
To which I say: 1. When you take a look at the number of grants made under this program (and they're all there in that spreadsheet program) and then look up the institution receiving those grants, you'd be surprised at just how many colleges, satellite campuses and other post-secondary institutions are in the most remote and rural parts of Canada, parts of Canada often represented by a Conservative.
2. I know of no database which would show all colleges, universities, and “qualifying institutions” in Canada, let alone all of those broken down by riding. If you know of one, let me know! What I do know is that KIP grants are for one thing: To build something. And that means they are identical to every other infrastructure program for hockey rinks, soccer fields, bridges, roads, and sewers in that that people who benefit from this infrastructure investment are not chemists or goalies, but electricians and boilermakers and welders and so on. A construction dollar is a construction dollar no matter who is spending it. It doesn't matter how many “qualifiying” bridges, roads, colleges, whatever are in a riding. All that matters is that a government — provincial, municipal or federal — found a reason to spend some money to build something there.
I should also note that last week, there were perfectly appropriate and defensible analyses of other infrastructure programs that did not look at “qualifying institutions”. I've adopted some of the basic methodologies and assumptions of some of my colleagues who did those analsyses and I plan to continue with the same “rules” as I look at other programs or — if Prime Minister Stephen Harper ever keeps his word and releases the entire list of infrastructure spending — as I look at the thousands of projects funded by the entire $62 billion economic stimulus plan.
