[Update: KML data from Elections Ontario is now also available]
After the 2008 election I obtained a PDF file of Ottawa Centre directly from Elections Canada and spent a few evenings drawing the polling areas using Google Earth. I did this so I could link the election results, by poll, to the various neighbourhoods around my riding and determine where the core Green Party support is located. Needless to say, staring at a PDF file and handdrawing it back into Google Earth is not too much fun. Wine helps - even if it makes things less accurate.
So when Elections Canada released the ESRI shapefiles for all of the ridings and poll boundaries I was excited! But I'm not a professional geographer and had no way to convert from the ESRI format to KML - until I discovered "ogr2ogr" (part of the gdal-lib package on Debian/Ubuntu). I figure there are other hobbiest who might be interested in the data but were in the same bind me, so I've decided to release all the KML (well, KMZ) files directly.
I've produced two
different data sets.
Riding Boundaries
This is the much smaller dataset of the two. Each KML file contains just the boundary of an individual riding. The good folks over at Homezilla had already done a similiar export - the only difference between theirs and mine is that I've kept each riding separate. If you're only interested in one riding it will be much easier to deal with.
Riding and Poll Boundaries
These KMZ files can be big beasts. Within each file is the riding itself (as above) and each poll. The Elections Canada data even differentiated between regular polls (a few blocks in a city or huge expanses of rural areas) and individual buildings and mobile polls. Normal polls are expressed as polygons - the others are expressed using placemarks.
What Are You Going To Build?
Like I mentioned in the opener, I've integrated this data with the Canada wide election results from 2008 in order to support the Green Party. While I'm a dedicated Green Party supporter I believe that Canada would be well served by an increase in voter turnout. If nothing else the various parties would have to contend with more "middle of the pack" voters, instead of relying on their mobilized bases who might be more inclined to hardline partisanship.
So here's the raw material ... I'm curious to know - what you're going to build?
A Word On Crown Copyright
One big difference between the United States and Canada is on copyright. In the US the government is expresly forbidden from owning a copyright on any material. So when any branch of the government produces a report, data, or email messages, it is forever put into the public domain and is therefore free to be accessed, researched, reused and repurposed without limitation. In Canada we enjoy no such freedom with the information our government produces. Instead we are limited by Crown Copyright. An excellent example of this is the raw data provided by Elections Canada we're all so excited to work with. Here's a small part of the license we have to adhere to in order to enjoy making KML files:
ARTICLE 2 – LICENCE
...
(a) be in an undignified context;
(b) be considered unfair, misleading or inaccurate;
(c) be used for advertising purposes in an undesirable manner;
(d) be used in a context that may prejudice or harm a third party;
(e) be considered inappropriate by Elections Canada;
(f) be considered out-of-date;
(g) infringe on the proprietary rights of third parties; or
(h) suggest an official endorsement by Her Majesty or Elections Canada where none exists.
(a) be in an undignified context;
(b) be considered unfair, misleading or inaccurate;
(c) be used for advertising purposes in an undesirable manner;
(d) be used in a context that may prejudice or harm a third party;
(e) be considered inappropriate by Elections Canada;
(f) be considered out-of-date;
(g) infringe on the proprietary rights of third parties; or
(h) suggest an official endorsement by Her Majesty or Elections Canada where none exists.
On the face of it none of those restrictions are too bad - but why do they have to exist at all? Among several other reforms, I believe the copyright laws we have in Canada should be modified ensure that all government data, when released, is released in an unrestricted format. If this piques your interest I'd recomment you head over to Michael Geist's blog - he's the expert.
I should mention I have no beef with Elections Canada on this - they are just following a government wide mandate of retaining copyright on all materials. My guess is there are a handful of GIS nerds inside Elections Canada who are extremely happy to see their excellent work being put to use by Canadians, and would be just as happy to see even more raw data flow out without being encumbered by Crown Copyright.
