All posts by Clayton Andres

Library and Archives Canada spending money to save money

Assignment 2
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It’s an expensive effort, but Library and Archives Canada is planning to save time and money in the future by making some of its most sought-after files readily accessible to all Canadians.

According to documents obtained through an Access to Information request, 10 million dollars has been committed towards digitizing personnel files of Canadians who served in the First World War.

Fabien Lengellé,  the Director General of Services at Library and Archives, said the current budget is closer to 6 million, but the cost will hopefully be worth it when the project is done in 2015.

Lengellé said Library and Archives will spend the next four years scanning and uploading around 650,000 service files from soldiers, officers, nurses, and other military personel. Lengellé estimaes there are between 18 and 20 million pages to digitize and every single one requires extreme caution to handle.

“The operation is a delicate one. The paper is over a hundred years old and it’s pretty frail.”

The following document obtained through an Access to Information Request contains information on the funding for this and other commemorative projects. Click the “Notes” tab to find out more about this project.

Some service files are already online. Click here to view the service file for Canada’s 14th Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.

The project is one of many projects supported by the federal government to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Canada’s participation in the First World War, but the digitization effort will have long-term benefits.

Lengellé said the files spend a lot of time being trucked back and forth between the preservation centre in Gatineau and the public reading rooms located in Library and Archives Canada’s headquarters in Ottawa.

The preservation centre was built 30 years after Library and Archives’ main building, which wasn’t advanced enough to properly preserve all the old files.

This transportation costs going from Gatineau to Ottawa a lot and runs the risk of permanently damaging these rare historical artifacts.

“To keep manipulating them puts the entire collection in jeopardy,” Lengellé said.

While this digitization project will certainly save money trucking so many files back and forth, the whole endeavour is still costly. Although Lengellé said the money is all coming from Library and Archives’ own budget.

“The bulk of it is going to go to the actual digitization effort,” Lengellé said. “That’s manual labour, that’s very costly.”

The number of people working on the files will change over time, but Library and Archives will be hiring extra staff to help complete the project.

Library and Archives moves around 3,000 files per year for various clients.

In an email, Carleton research professor Tim Cook said the digital archives will be helpful for him and many others.

“Having the 600,000 available will be a new and incredible resource for historians, genealogists, and historically minded Canadians.”

Lengellé said the files are sometimes requested by historical researchers, but a lot of the time it’s relatives of the soldiers wanting to know about their own heritage.

“650,000 people represents 8 per cent of the Canadian population at the time. So anybody who’s got Canadian roots over 100 years old has a relative in those files.”

Library and Archives used to digitize on demand for Canadians living too far from Ottawa to come view the files. Although it saved travel costs for the person who requested the file, Lengellé said digitizing on demand “would cost Canadians 40 cents a page.”

This new digital archive of service files be available to all Canadians completely free of charge.

Although having all the service files in digital format will save some money for both the Library and Archives and Canadians, Lengellé said the project won’t change too much of the department’s regular activities.

“It will make a difference, I’m not downplaying it, but I don’t it would be a major difference on our physical operation in Ottawa.”

After the files are completely uploaded, Library and Archives will start looking at which documents they should digitize next.

“Once we’re done this one, we’ll look at what’s good for clients, what makes sense, and we’ll move on.”

Alberta having trouble getting defibrillator coverage

Database Assignment
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The above map shows the locations of every registered AEDs in Alberta. Mapped using data from Alberta Health Services PAD program

Albertans prone to cardiac arrests might want to stay close to the big cities.

According to data published by Alberta Health Services, most of the province’s publicly accessible defibrillators are concentrated in urban centres.

Paramedic John Hein said this trend is very problematic.

“Rural locations are the most void of devices, which is the opposite of what we would want to do,” he said. “The more rural you are, the longer it’s going to take an ambulance or a fire response to get to you.”

John Hein, PAD Coordinator, Alberta Health Services
John Hein, PAD Coordinator, Alberta Health Services

Automated External Defibrillators, or AEDs are used on patients who have had cardiac arrests. The device checks if the person’s heart has stopped and if so, restarts the heart by delivering an electric shock through the chest.

Alberta Health Services runs the Public Access to Defibrillation program, which keeps track of all devices purchased in the province. The health authority publishes the location and status of the AEDs on their online database, but its up to the owner of the device to volunteer that information.

Hein said there have been 8,000 defibrillators sold in the province, but few of those are registered with the PAD program, let alone regularly maintained.

Hein said even if all the devices in the province were in active use, this would be nowhere near enough.

“I would say that’s a very small number of devices for a population of 5 million people.”

  Most of the devices in the province are located in cities. Hein said Health Services has been trying to get more AED coverage in the rest of the province, but convincing people to make the investment has been a challenging at times. “There’s a bit of pushback. The communities are saying, ‘This is a health device, shouldn’t health care pay for this?’ ” Hein is also concerned how many of the devices that have been bought and go unused. “People put them into locked cabinets or behind closed doors. We’re concerned about those because if a device is needed and you don’t have the key to get into that cabinet, then the device is useless.” In other provinces, the situation is a bit different. In Manitoba, all AEDs must be registered and maintained thanks to provincial leglislation. The Defibrillator Public Access Act of 2012 required AEDs to be placed in a number of  public areas, including gyms, schools, golf courses and community centres. Tammy Witko with the Manitoba Office of the Heart and Stroke Foundation said prior to the legislation, there were less than 100 defibrillators registered throughout the province. Now there are 2,800 publicly active devices and counting. Witko said the new law didn’t just enforce certain groups to invest in AEDs, it also encouraged other businesses not covered in the legislation to get involved. “People are so aware of it they are going to purchase and register them on their own,” Witko said. “We have people calling us up, like restaurants, saying ‘Why weren’t we in your legislation?’ ” Witko said even rural communities that don’t have large public areas have put in the effort to make sure they have AEDs where people need them. “They are really quite inventive in the cottage country. If they have a facility or building that everyone uses, they would choose that as the place to put their own.” Hein said Alberta has not considered any similar legislation. For now, he said health authority is focused on getting their message out about the importance of having AEDs readily available for those in need. “I think we’ve got a long ways to go as a province and as a country to get these devices as popular as fire extinguishers or smoke detectors.”

Heat Map - AEDs Alberta
A heat map showing the concentration of AEDs throughout the province of Alberta


The Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s guide to AED use and safety.

The animated family that changed television has barely changed at all

Whatever-Happened-To? Assignment, , ,
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They were skinny. They were crude. And they were yellow.

And he loved them all.

Ken Priebe is an animation instructor working at VanArts in British Columbia. He was in middle school the first time he and his parents watched The Simpsons on TV.

He remembers seeing the sloppily-drawn family when they made their debut in a short skit on The Tracey Ullman Show.

But it wasn’t until they appeared on their own, full-length program that the animated family made their first real impact.

“It was a huge success. They were huge,” he said. “It was a really big deal to have an animated show like that on primetime.”

The Simpsons first premiered on the Fox network on December 17, 1989. The show featured the donut-loving father Homer, his scraggly-voiced wife Marge,  rabble-rousing son Bart,  super-intelligent daughter Lisa, and the pacifier-sucking infant Maggie.

It wasn’t long after the show hit the airwaves that the family began to take North America by storm.

Priebe remembers the massive wave of merchandizing, mostly centred around Bart and his bad-boy attitude.

“He was the superstar of the show,” Priebe said. “He was like the cool kid, the troublemaker.”

The spiky-haired ten-year-old became a cultural icon. Kids would show up at school wearing t-shirts and backpacks bearing catchphrases like “Underachiever and proud of it” and “Eat my shorts,” much to the horror of their teachers.

“This show was seen by a lot of people as a sign of the end of civilization as we know it,” said Robert Thompson, an expert on popular culture and television history at Syracuse University.

Before its first season had ended, one Ohio principal had already banned all Simpson T-shirts in his school. And other teachers soon followed his example.

But the outcries of disgust aimed against the show quickly died down.

“Most people who had actually bothered to watch the show began to start coming around to the fact that they were going to have to grudgingly admit that this show was the best thing on television,” Thompson said.

“It really was some of the best social commentary and political commentary out there.”

Priebe said The Simpsons is one of the reasons he is able to work in animation today.

According to Priebe, animation was a dead-end industry prior to the 1990s. But with its slick style and clever characters, The Simpsons was “one of the things that made animation cool.”

As the show grew in popularity, so too did the number of its imitators. 

Shows like Beavis and Butthead, Family Guy and South Park all took cues from The Simpsons, lampooning celebrities, politicians and pop culture in general.

“The Simpsons success spawned this whole new era,” Priebe said.

But for Priebe, a lot of the newer shows relied too much on crude humour and shock value rather than creating endearing characters.

“That’s what made The Simpsons work. The characters were like the people in your own town and the people in your own family. ”

Priebe hasn’t seen the show in a while, but not because he thinks it’s not funny anymore.

“I haven’t watched it regularly. It’s not cause I don’t like the show, but life gets busy.”

Thompson said the show has declined in popularity over the past few years because it no longer stands out in the landscape it created.

“I’m not willing to say The Simpsons is no good anymore,” Thompson said. “But it’s not innovative, it’s by definition old fashioned.”

But Thompson also said the show’s longevity is one of its crowning successes.

“The biggest thing about The Simpsons is when people ask, ‘Where is The Simpsons?’ 25 years later, the answer is it’s still on the air.”

Simpsons – Background Documentation

Bombardier analysts unfazed by financial setbacks

Business Assignment
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A Montreal-based transportation company has managed to keep investors optimistic about its future even though it has suffered significant financial losses and production delays.

Bombardier Inc. posted a loss of more than $230 million US for their 2012 fiscal year.

The company decided to “restructure” in “an effort to improve competitiveness and cost structure” in 2012, which involved more than 1,200 jobs cut and the closure of a plant in Germany. This restructuring cost the company $119 million.

Below is an annotated Bombardier’s Annual Report for 2012. Click “Notes” at the top to scroll through the annotations.



As it turns out, 2012’s financial setbacks were only the beginning for the multinational company.

This year, Bombardier released a private memo to its employees, announcing the permanent laying off of 1,700 of its employees. This memo came right after an announcement that its C-Series jet planes would be delayed from hitting the market until late 2015. 

According to a report by JP Morgan analyst Joseph Nadol, the layoffs aren’t directly related to the delay of the C-Series, but “the cash requirements for that program are causing management to seek to preserve cash elsewhere.”

Bombardier also saw the the loss of another senior vice-president back in early December. The company did not comment on whether the former employee left on his own accord or whether his departure was linked to diminishing orders for the C-Series.

The additional job losses and product delays don’t bode well for the company’s future considering how much they lost last year. However, Bombardier’s stock has been doing well recently.

In fact, according an online report by Nasdaq, Bombardier was the most active share on the Toronto Stock Exchange this past week, with its stock climbing nearly 3 per cent. 

Eric Kirzner, a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, said that for a low-priced stock like Bombardier’s, the move in price was “not insignificant.”

He says the company, by maintaining this price level in such a weak market, is “bucking the trend.”

However, Kirzner also said this could likely have more to do with the optimism of Bombardier’s analysts.

“Stocks don’t normally react to news unless the news is totally unexpected,” he said. “Stocks tend to anticipate events long in advance.”

“The events that have taken place at Bombardier in the last year have either been not that important or the events themselves were pretty well-anticipated.”

Kirzner said he looked into Bombardier a short while ago and found that there is either no news that is surprising or things turned out to be not quite as bad as expected for investors.

“It’s the anticipation, not the event itself that’s the key to share prices.”

Kirzner’s assessment appears to be correct.

Noah Poponak, an analyst with Goldman Sachs, follows Bombardier closely.  He identified a decline in the demand for regional and business jets as well as the large amount of cash usage coming from the development of the C-Series as key risks for investing in the company.

He also noted Bombardier received 81 orders in 2013 compared to 138 the previous year, a 40 per cent drop.

In spite of this, Poponak confirmed there was “no change” to his estimates for the company in the coming years.

His own report predicts an eight per cent growth in the company’s net income for 2014 and additional 13 per cent rise for 2015.

The company was just this week declared the 24th most sustainable companies in the world by investment advisory company Corporate Knights Inc.

It looks like regardless of their financial difficulties in the present, investors and analysts believe things are still looking up for the company’s future.