ACOA

Tim Bousquet's recent castigation of John Risley for criticising the film industry tax credit while simultaneously feeding at the ACOA trough got me curious about where Tim got the nice info about the ACOA grants Risley received over the years.

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?

190172Central Community Development CorporationGRAND FALLS12/10/2006200,000.00Non-Repayable ContributionCore 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?

193610Grand Bank Development CorporationGRAND BANK7/29/200835,399.00Non-Repayable ContributionCarry 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.