This is to announce that Andrew, with the able assistance of some of his fellow bloggers, has been busy performing a public service.
The story as I understand it is that Elections Canada at one point had a pretty spiffy searchable database online that could be used to find out who's been making contributions to political parties in Canada. And then people started using it and, you know, actually finding out stuff whereupon Elections Canada, in its infinite wisdom, decided to replace something that worked pretty well with something that was slower, clunkier and more difficult to deal with.
So Andrew and company have been gathering the data using methods that the less geeky amongst you probably don't even want to talk about and building the tool that EC should be providing. The post I linked to above is Andrew's latest progress report. The Unofficial Canadian Political Contributions Search Tool is here.
Shame on Elections Canada. That information belongs to all of us. And good for Andrew and the others (whom I don't want to name 'cos I know I'll leave some out) for taking the time and trouble to put this together. We can hope that they'll embarrass the government into doing the right thing.
But I'm not holding my breath.
Thanks for the link Pogge. :) The geek in me loves having a side project like this to work on. Even better if people are able to make use of it.
Good Site, Andrew! I've bookmarked it and will be referring often.
Good stuff, but where is the current Conservative Party?:)
ERK! Good catch Leons.... I just added a pile of data for them (2004) and completely missed the menu item for the CPC. I'll fix that right now.
I congratulate Andrew and others on their work.
I wish someone would undertake something similar for the www.parl.gc.ca search tool, which is mostly hopeless, as far as I can make out.
It doesn't even let you sort results by date.
User-unfriendly, to say the least.