Imagine my delight to discover that all grants and contributions over $25,000 since 2006 are posted quarterly in a downloadable CSV file.
And imagine my consternation to discover that, in the great tradition of Opaque Government, the data is difficult in the extreme to use.
8810 transactions totaling $2,268,311,321.33 are unhelpfully listed with no attempt to classify their purpose and a singularly awkward geographic component. Can you figure out which province got this grant?
190172 | Central Community Development Corporation | GRAND FALLS | 12/10/2006 | 200,000.00 | Non-Repayable Contribution | Core funding for support of ongoing operations |
Is it Grand Falls New Brunswick, or Grand Falls Newfoundland? Is CCDC a business or something else? I guess Core Funding could be an 'Operating Grant', but how is that different from this?
193610 | Grand Bank Development Corporation | GRAND BANK | 7/29/2008 | 35,399.00 | Non-Repayable Contribution | Carry out investment attraction activities |
Frustrating. But apart from learning that ACOA has no interest in making their work public, I managed to find some gems.
So I went through all 8810 transactions and found the province for all but 462 (I probably made some mistakes). This is how it looks:
And generally the "grants" are vanishingly small - about 0.13% of the $2.3 billion:
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As for the difference between a "Grant" and a "Non-Repayable Contribution"? There is no data dictionary I could find, so I'm assuming they're the same thing.
Then I searched the descriptions, trying to classify the contributions. Here's a sample:
Phase II - downtown Sydney revitalization |
Construct Cultural Heritage Centre |
Business Centre/Incubator Mall |
Three Year Funding 2008-2011 |
Broadband Phase 2 Infrastructure |
Establish a modern fish drying facility |
This was entertaining; Energy, Tech, Women - all pretty obvious. Others were more problematic, and I ended up just classifying the 368 transactions of $1 million or more. That accounts for 54% of the money. Here's how I categorized the awards. The lesson is to be a university or mention the word "technology":
You will see that I made a separate category for Origin BioMed.
Here is a visual to compare the categories by geography. Again, transactions over $1 million. Click a blue header to drill down:
Finally, here are the top 100 recipients for you to play with. This is cumulative since 2006. Click headings to sort:
Ocean Nutrition (Risley) and Origin BioMed are about halfway down - in the $6 million range.