Last week was the Community Data Program’s Annual Meeting, hosted by Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health in Guelph, Ontario.

A new study looks at measurements of happiness in Canadian communities and finds that the old saying is true: money isn’t everything.

Researchers are increasingly using data to gauge qualitative factors like quality of life. While important aspects like affordable housing and short commutes can be easily put into numbers, the most important factor- sense of community belonging- remains somewhat more abstract.

The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, a CDP Member Organization, is carrying out the Fort McMurray region’s first official population count since the mass evacuation during the May 2016 wildfire.

Socio-economic supervisor Kodjo Efu is leading the effort to figure out how many of the 80,000+ evacuees have since returned.

Montreal-based Powered by Data is sharing their new project on administrative data sharing. In this blog post, they show how this type of data-sharing can offer innovative solutions to problems facing nonprofits.

The Community Data Project's Annual Report for the year ending March 31, 2018 is now available.

Contents include the year in review, the program budget, and plans for the next year, including data acquisition. We've also included highlights of our recent website redesign and results from the user survey.

Thanks to everyone at the Canadian Council on Social Development for their support!

Statistics Canada is hosting a “Chat with an Expert” session- Gross domestic product by industry: Provinces and territories, 2017.

From Statistics Canada:

How did the economy of my province or territory compare to that of other provinces or territories in 2017?

The next T1FF webinar will be held on May 8. This webinar series is intended to help you understand basic (standard) taxfiler tables and learn how to better use them.
 
Taxfiler data, or T1-derived datasets, are generated from individual tax files from the Canada Revenue Agency from the Income Statistics Division of Statistics Canada. These datasets are published on a yearly basis and are an increasingly important source of Canada-wide income data.
 

Are you in the Ottawa area and want to learn more about how community data is used in the non-profit sector? Take advantage of a special discount for the 7th annual Leveraging Our Strengths Conference. Held at Algonquin College, the conference is an excellent and affordable opportunity to draw upon and share in the strengths and best practices of Ottawa’s non-profit sector.

In 2018, Statistics Canada changed how the Census Family Low Income Measure was calculated. Two new papers explain the use of the Low Income Measure from the T1 Family File.

Many were excited when Sidewalk Labs (the urban innovation branch of Google’s Alphabet) won a competition to develop Toronto’s Quayside neighbourhood, promising to integrate data and urban design.

Yet, the project has proved controversial for many reasons, not least of which are questions surrounding data collection and use.