lchski/canada-2015-federal-election-data

JSON data for the 2015 Canadian federal election.

2015 Canadian Election Data

Candidates

For a project I’m working on, I needed a list of all federal election candidates, linked to their ridings. Elections Canada provides this, in a tab-delimited CSV file (obtainable here, and in the repo as Candidates.txt), but CSV is a pain to work with on the web—so I used csvkit to convert the CSV file into a set of JSON files, one for each province.

This is the command used to generate the compressed JSON files:

csvgrep -t -e utf-16-le -c 1 -r "{REGION_CODE}[0-9][0-9][0-9]" data.csv | csvjson > {REGION_ABBREVIATION}.json

This is the command used to generate the uncompressed JSON files:

csvgrep -t -e utf-16-le -c 1 -r "{REGION_CODE}[0-9][0-9][0-9]" data.csv | csvjson -i 4 > {REGION_ABBREVIATION}.json

The region codes are the two number prefixes employed by Elections Canada for their Electoral District Numbers, and the region abbreviation is the standard two-letter abbreviation used by Canada Post for each region of Canada. The following table lists that information:

Proper Name	Region Code	Region Abbreviation
Newfoundland and Labrador	10	NL
Prince Edward Island	11	PE
Nova Scotia	12	NL
New Brunswick	13	NB
Quebec	24	QC
Ontario	35	ON
Manitoba	46	MB
Saskatchewan	47	SK
Alberta	48	AB
British Columbia	59	BC
Yukon	60	YT
Northwest Territories	61	NT
Nunavut	62	NU

Ridings

For the same project, I need a list of all 338 ridings. Fortunately, we can process our data.csv file to give us that, too:

csvcut -t -e utf-16-le -c 1,2,3 data.csv | uniq > ridings.csv

Because there are multiple entries per riding in data.csv, we have to filter out duplicates with uniq. To make this more usable on the web, we convert it to JSON:

csvjson ridings.csv > compressed/ridings.json (compressed)

csvjson -i 4 ridings.csv > uncompressed/ridings.json (uncompressed)