Parliament

Since 1880, every word spoken in Canada’s parliamentary debates has been transcribed and recorded into a massive document called Hansard. To put the size and scale of Hansard in perspective, reading the entire document at a pace of about a novel a day would take 66 years.

But this rich, historical document was becoming less usable every year because of its size – until a group of University of Toronto political scientists, computer scientists and historians decided to intervene.

“You have this really unrivalled historical resource that is accumulated over time, and by virtue of its size and magnitude, is impenetrable,” says Christopher Cochrane, associate professor of political science at �Թϱ�� Scarborough. “That is the status of Hansard prior to digitization.”

In 2013, Cochrane teamed up with two postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students and Graeme Hirst, professor of computer science at �Թϱ�� Scarborough, to create LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project.

LiPaD has digitized and made searchable Canada’s parliamentary debates dating back to 1901. It also created and designed a website to make the documents more accessible to the public, a project headed by PhD student Tanya Whyte.

“Making these data very clearly accessible, very clearly searchable and opening it to everybody basically takes something that was becoming of little use because of its size and makes its use as enormous,” says Cochrane.

With a click, users can also find more information on parliamentarians, such as their party affiliation and gender. The site is continually adding more information on members, including demographic profiles and election outcomes.

Christopher Cochrane, associate professor of political science at �Թϱ�� Scarborough, says LiPaD puts the usefulness of Canada's Hansard on par with its size (photo by Ken Jones)

The process began with Canadiana, a non-profit heritage coalition, which scanned every page of the Hansard and posted them online. But as pictures instead of text, the documents could not be searched with keywords.

The good news for the LiPaD team is they did not have to physically scan the documents, but there were other challenges. Many of the documents, some more than a century old, were physically damaged with specks, bits of dirt or smudges from printing. This made it hard for optical character recognition (OCR) programs, which convert written or printed words into text a computer can read, to correctly register the contents of the pages.

The quality of the documents, particularly stray specks, made it difficult to read French words. OCR settings that allowed French accent marks would also confuse specks for accents. Meanwhile, OCR settings that read only English had trouble reading genuine French accent marks. LiPaD is currently only available for English proceedings, but Cochrane says the team is interested in eventually offering the French proceedings as well.

The OCR would often err with English as well. Hirst says a common stumbling point was in the standard parliamentary phrase “Hon. member,” short for Honourable member. If the “H” was even slightly obscured or broken, the computer would misread the term as “lion member.”

“That’s an easy one to fix, because obviously we would expect there to be zero occurrences of ‘lion member,’” Hirst says. “But it illustrates the kind of low quality that we were up against all over the place, including ones that weren’t so easy to fix.”

To remedy this, Kaspar Beelen, now an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, created several rules, allowing the computer to recognize common mistakes and giving it instructions to fix them.

The massive amount of publicly accessible data, which can be downloaded in multiple formats, is a powerful tool for future work.

“If you present the world with an interesting data set, people will find ways to use it that you yourself never thought of,” Hirst says. “I hope that there are people out there doing that with LiPaD right now.”

Ludovic Rheault, now an assistant professor of politicial science at �Թϱ��, joined the project in 2014 and began conducting applied research projects using the data from LiPaD. In one paper, published in 2016, he used the data to study how the language parliamentarians use in debates can indicate anxiety levels.

Rheault says the intersection of computer science, political science and language represents the most appealing thing he found about LiPaD – the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary team.

“To grow as a citizen and a researcher, having the ability to look at what people do in other disciplines often times makes you realize that, ‘Oh, I was completely blind or oblivious to this solution or a particular problem,’” he says. “It helps you change the way you see problem-solving in general.”

The project has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Digging into Data initiative.

Election 2015: what happens if nobody wins a clear majority?

sgupta — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 10:41:44 +0000

Election 2015: what happens if nobody wins a clear majority? sgupta Tue, 10/13/2015 - 06:41

Cutline

(photo by A Yee via flickr)

Alan Christie

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Alan Christie

Read more Election 2015 coverage

Loewen, an associate professor of political science, spoke with writer Alan Christie about the election and the procedures followed after all the votes are cast.

Will more people vote in this election, given the apparent mood for change and the well-publicized campaign to get young people to cast ballots on Oct. 19?
If I had to hazard an estimate, I’d say that turnout will be within two points of where it was last time, either above or below. (In the federal election of 2011, 61.1 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots).

It’s very hard to get young people to vote, so I don’t think we should expect a large change (about one-third of those 18-24 voted in 2011).

There are 338 seats up for grabs in this election up from 308 in the last House of Commons. Does redistribution favour the governing party? Has it addressed some of the inequities with regard to rural ridings and urban ridings?
With the exception of one seat in Quebec, the remainder of seats have been added to largely suburban ridings in Ontario, Alberta, and B.C. This is probably to the advantage of the Conservative Party, on balance. That said, this has not done much to address the very large disparity in populations between rural and urban ridings.

It is important for Canadians to know that our riding populations vary by a very large amount. Constituency populations vary by as much as 25 per cent above or below the average constituency population in a respective province. In practical terms, this means that some constituencies in a province might have 125,000 voters while another has 75,000. This really affects voting power, and it is not really addressed by these reforms.

What happens if no party gets a majority – 170 seats? What is the process used to form a new government? Can you explain the role of the Governor General in this process?
This is actually not an entirely clear answer to this, but the basic set of moves is the following. The Prime Minister has the first opportunity to try to form a government, regardless of whether he has won the most seats or not. That said, Prime Minister Harper has indicated that if he is not leading the seat count then he will not attempt to form a government. If he is first, he will attempt to pass a Speech from the Throne. This will be put to a vote by the House of Commons.

The opposition parties can respond in several ways. They can let the Speech pass. At that point, Harper is largely in the clear. Second, they can vote the Speech down. If they do this, they have three broad options.

First, they can form a coalition in which they would share cabinet seats and jointly govern.

Second, one of those parties – likely the one with the most seats – can form the government with support from the other according to a formal agreement. Such an agreement would spell out which policies the government would pass.

Third, one of the parties can attempt to govern with case-by-case support from one of the opposition parties. As for the Governor General, I think his role is less clear than political scientists and constitutional experts like to pretend. In short, his job is to judge whether a government has sufficient support to govern, and if not, to identify which party or parties might be able to govern. How he decides to do this and when he will do it after the election is largely at his discretion.

If the Tories can pass a Throne Speech then they have a case for an election if they are later defeated. But if the Throne Speech fails, then the Governor General will assess whether an alternative formation has a chance of succeeding.

There have been quite a few minority governments in Canadian history, including ones led by Stephen Harper, Paul Martin, Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker. How effective can they be?
I think the evidence is that a lot can be done. We should not be worried about minority governments. In general terms, I think we have a very robust political system. It can survive whatever government form or Prime Minister emerges.

If the Conservatives win the most seats but not a majority and are toppled in a confidence vote by the opposition parties, what changes do you see happening with a new Liberal or NDP government?

This is a good question. I think that the untold story in this election is that passing laws takes time. A new government will have to decide how much time they will devote to reversing laws that they oppose and to proposing new laws or programs that they support. This is, in my mind, an open question.

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Parliament

�Թϱ��� team brings Hansard, one of Canada’s most important documents, into the digital age

Election 2015: what happens if nobody wins a clear majority?

Read more Election 2015 coverage

�Թϱ�� team brings Hansard, one of Canada’s most important documents, into the digital age