Now you can actually know it all

Our friend Alice at punditsguide.ca continues to astound and confound with the depth of information she’s piling into her ultimate politics-geek website. The latest: 2006 Canada Census data, broken down by riding.

This is pure electoral-geek heaven. Alice explains: "Stats Can released the 2006 Census Data by Federal Electoral District (FED ... i.e., federal riding) on June 26. My value-added is that I’ve scraped all that into my database, grouped and sub-grouped it, computed all the percentages, and computed each riding’s rank (nationally, regionally, provincially, and "local-region"-ally) both top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, on each measure they provided."

So say, hypothetically, there was a federal by-election coming in Westmount-Ville Marie. What would Alice’s charts and graphs tell us? So much. They would tell us so much. For instance...

We see that Westmount-Ville Marie has the country’s second-highest percentage of people who lived outside Canad 1 year ago and five years go, and the highest percentage of non-permanent residents. (Alice’s best guess: McGill and Concordia university students.) The riding is third in the country in knowledge of both official languages, sixth for people who claim Arab ethnicity, and last in the country in the number who have no post-secondary education at all.

I’d tell you more, but the charm of punditsguide is that you can decide for yourself what you want to look for and go data-mine for yourself. Here’s the link for the StatsCan data for the three ridings facing more or less imminent by-elections. The other 305 have all the same data, so you can get lost for hours...

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St. Lambert, Quebec

Westmount-Ville Marie, Quebec

Guelph, Ontario