Canadian federal court orders the release of mine pollutant data

April 27, 2009 in campaigns, canada, datasets, federal government, government, infrastructure, policy, politics, resources, science by Tracey | 3 comments

It is quite surprising that this was not the norm, to manage the public good!

the Federal Court of Canada released late yesterday that it will force the federal government to stop withholding data on one of Canada’s largest sources of pollution – millions of tonnes of toxic mine tailings and waste rock from mining operations throughout the country.

The Federal Court sided with the groups and issued an Order demanding that the federal government immediately begin publicly reporting mining pollution data from 2006 onward to the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI). The strongly worded decision describes the government’s pace as “glacial” and chastises the government for turning a “blind eye” to the issue and dragging its feet for “more than 16 years”.

I look forward to reading the court order. According to Ecojustice (Formerly the Sierra Legal Defence Fund) the ruling includes the following strong wording:

* It calls the federal government’s pace “glacial”[paragraph 145];
* It says the government’s approach has been simply to turn a “blind eye”[207];
* It notes that the frustration felt by advocates trying to uncover this information “after more than 16 years of consultation” is “perfectly understandable” [124];
* It states that not reporting “denies the Canadian public its rights to know how it is threatened by a major source of pollution”[127];
* It highlights that the minister has chosen not to publish the pollution data “in deference to” the mining industry[220];
* It used unusually simple language even I understand when it said that the government was simply “wrong”[177].

The advocates were: Justin Duncan and Marlene Cashin and their dedicated clients at Great Lakes United and Mining Watch Canada who launched the case in 2007.

It is uncertain how these data will be released. Currently, these types of pollutant data are released on the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) which is:

The National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) is Canada’s legislated, publicly accessible inventory of pollutant releases (to air, water and land), disposals and transfers for recycling. (Mining Watch)

The NPRI is fairly usable & accessible, includes georeferencing and some mapping services. I tried to use their library and it was however not working!

The Mining Association of Canada wants to read the ruling “carefully” to assess how Environment Canada should release these data. I find this confusing, since I thought the Government got to decide how these data are to be released and what is to be included, and that decision was based on ensuring the public good and the public right to know. The fight is not yet quite over. It will be important to ensure the data are not watered down for public consumption.

It is another wonderful example of creating an infrastructure – NPRI + law – to distribute public data. This also teaches us something about gouvernementalité, and who the government thinks with, in this case the mineral and mining industry and not citizens. Citizens should not have to lobby for 16 years and expend incredible resources to get the courts to get the government to ensure the public good!

Articles:

  • Court orders pollution data from mining made public, By Juliet O’Neill, Canwest News ServiceApril 24, 2009
  • Environment Canada forced to reveal full extent of pollution from mines
    Court ruling considered major victory for green organizations    , MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, Saturday’s Globe and Mail, April 24, 2009
  • Great Lakes United Press Release, Court victory forces Canada to report pollution data for mines, April 24, 2009 – 11:16am — Brent Gibson

    • Mining Watch Press Release: Court Victory Forces Canada to Report Pollution Data for Mines, Friday April 24, 2009 11:31 AM

    To Save the Earth, Start With Data

    April 22, 2009 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

    That is the title of a Wired Article I just read! Short! Sweet! and to the point as to ways to put good data to use!

    Happy earth day all!

    Now were talkin’ data

    April 19, 2009 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

    The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)

    is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).

    It also consists of

    of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and “hand”/”arm” polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1370 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

    And it is available online for free! Kudos to the linguists!

    Via: Open Access News

    Some Charts Look Like a Pie, and You Know That’s Sweet

    April 19, 2009 in Art, science by Hugh | Permalink

    [via Boing Boing]

    Canadian MP Vote being tracked

    April 19, 2009 in canada, Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

    How’dTheyVote.ca followed by OurParliament.ca are two Canadian citizen led projects that developed information services to citizens regarding the voting patterns of their Federal MPs.

    VoteForTheEnvironment.ca was a vote swapping site created for the last elections which included a postal code lookup that led users to a map of their electoral district and to the electoral candidates for those ridings.

    Libby Davies, MP Vancouver East, was the inspiration for the new Parliament of Canada service that tracks how MPs vote. If you look at Libby’s profile, you will see a vote tab that will lead to a list of bills she has and has not voted on and how she voted.

    I wonder if those will stay up during the next elections and how long these records will remain public once the MP has moved on. It would be fantastic to see City Councilor and Provincial & Territorial MPP votes.

    These services help citizens track what is being done, and provides a decision making service to citizens who will want to assess the stances taken by up-and coming representatives at election time.

    Via: Michael Geist, and BoingBoing.
    The Star Article: MP voting records go online.

    /The World of 100

    April 14, 2009 in academia, Access, canada, Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

    /The World of 100

    Tony Ng

    Tony Ng

    via: FlowingData

    Command and Control –> Collaboration and Teamwork

    March 28, 2009 in government, infrastructure, tools, web by Hugh | Permalink

    John Chambers, CEO of CISCO on what the future holds, from MITWorld. He thinks we are about to see the most fundamental change in businesses and government that we’ve ever seen, moving from command and control to collaboration and teamwork.

    UK Guardian Data + ManyEyes = ISAF Troops Contribution Story

    March 28, 2009 in government, Uncategorized by Tracey | 1 comment

    My son may be sent to Afghanistan as part of the Canadian ISAF Contribution which makes looking at these data more important to me.  I am very impressed with how the UK Guardian Data Blog shares the datasets the paper compiles with its stories and I have been having a great time experimenting with IBM’s ManyEyes.

    First I was looking at the UK Guardian Story How many troops does each country send to Afghanistan?  In particular their Afghanistan map of Where the Troops are.

    I used the Guardian’s date to create the following visualization:
    Tag Cloud which nicely sandwiched the worlds contribution between United and States.

    TreeMap which unfortunately lacks colour but does adequately shows the proportion of the contributions

    08b7461e-1bb3-11de-9871-000255111976 Blog_this_caption

    and

    a Global Map of who is contributing which I think is very useful and telling of who is in and who is not.

    Cedeadda-1bab-11de-9871-000255111976 Blog_this_caption

    and

    a Bubblechart, which shows the proportions again, with colour, however, I find that bubbles makes the story seem a less serious than it actually is

    3f6b7034-1bb0-11de-9287-000255111976 Blog_this_caption

    Great Maps – Le Monde Diplomatique

    March 27, 2009 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

    Philippe Rekacewicz — mars 2009, Monde Diplomatique

    Philippe Rekacewicz — mars 2009, Monde Diplomatique

    I came across this headline for a map – la Géographie des savants accompanied by the following article La guerre des idées this morning. I also discovered a treasure trove of global issue thematic cartographic representations.  There was also a great article that reinvoked that age old debate around visualization, art, objectivity, truth in La cartographie, entre science, art et manipulation.  It is very refreshing to see and read this material since in the non-French world we rarely use the word cartography in any popular sense anymore, and with the advent of google and mashups we are also seeing mapping, and GIS – which of course have their merits but do lack in the aesthetic communicative rigour. Cartography is a wonderful scientific art that both delights and informs, and what a pleasure to find a rich visual narrative of the world here at le Monde Diplomatique this morning.

    Cuts to CISTI mean less access to Science Data

    March 17, 2009 in academia, Access, canada, datasets, federal government, geo, infrastructure, open access, science by Tracey | 1 comment

    Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) is

    Canada’s national science library and leading scientific publisher, provides Canada’s research and innovation community with tools and services for accelerated discovery, innovation and commercialization.

    CISTI delvers science data and information to Canadians online, in the Depository Service and as paper delivery service to researchers in Universities.  But its days of doing that are numbered…

    CISTI has just suffered very serious budget cuts – 70% cut – that affects scientific innovation, access to scientific data, the dissemination of Canadian Science and open access publishing.

    The Government of Canada and the National Research Council of Canada have decided that the journals and services of NRC Research Press will be transferred to the private sector.

    Privatization? In a sense they are a victim of their own success.  The NRC frames it as follows in a letter to their clients (e.g. Depository Service Program):

    this transformation is not the development of a “new business” but the movement of a successful program into a new legal and business environment. It is our belief that this new environment will afford us more flexibility to manage our publishing activities.

    More flexibility to reduce services to Canadians more like it since the Depository Services Program (DSP) and the delivery of online access to journals to Canadians cannot be funded by an entity outside of the Federal government, and it is expected that the termination date to journals delivered in this way will be sometime in 2010.

    This means less access to scientific journals to Canadians. Research Canadians have paid for!  CISTI journals deposited in the DSP were important, since the DSP’s:

    primary objective is to ensure that Canadians have ready and equal access to federal government information. The DSP achieves this objective by supplying these materials to a network of more than 790 libraries in Canada and to another 147 institutions around the world holding collections of Canadian government publications.

    In addition, hundreds of government jobs – scientists, librarians and researchers are expected to be lost.  The budget cut is $35 million in annual expenditures.

    This plan includes a reduction in NRC’s a-base funding totalling $16.8 million per year by 2011-2012 (announced in Budget 2009) as well as reductions in revenue-generating activities.

    Hmm! Wonder what our current Federal Minister of State for Science and Technology’s thoughts are about science?

    Here are a couple of articles:

    Actions:

    Here are a few articles:

  • NRC cuts could affect 300 positions, The Ottawa Citizen
  • Access to CISTI Source to End

    • Action:

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