An Ottawa Citiizen investigation has found about 1 in 20 gas pumps in Canada was pumping less gas than indicated on the readout when inspected. Citizen reporter Glen McGregor obtained Measurement Canada inspection data under the Access to Information Act. His stories led to promises of a crackdown by Ottawa.You can read the series and look at…
Practising reporters and students of journalism have a new guide through the complexities of investigative reporting in Canada. Digging Deeper: A Canadian Reporter’s Research Guide is the work of Robert Cribb, Dean Jobb, David McKrie and Fred Vallance-Jones, each an investigative reporter and professor of journalism. Digging Deeper offers practical, effective ways to access information…
WHOIS searches on .ca domain names are about to get a whole lot less informative. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is slapping on new privacy restrictions. The name of the registrant, plus the contact information for sites registered to individuals will no longer be available via WHOIS. That means journalists researching who is behind a site…
The Nova Scotia government says it will begin to post restaurant health inspections online this summer. The announcement came in the provincial legislature in response to an opposition private members bill to make such postings mandatory. Agriculture Minister Brooke Taylor says the system will post results going back three years, starting from the date the…
The decision by Ottawa to scrap its CAIRS system for tracking access to information requests has caused one of those passing flaps on the Hill. But is the move a real threat to openness? I’m not sure, because it doesn’t appear there’s been much openness to threaten lately.
Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor once again showed why he’s one of the best CAR reporters in the country with his analysis of House of Commons votes by the Liberal opposition.McGregor downloaded electronic copies of the house journals, which record such matters as votes. He then extracted the vote information into a database to discover…
CBC has lost an important case about access to electronic data. The decision provides important backing for a position advanced by federal bureaucrats that data requested under the Access to Information Act should be withheld if there is a chance someone could be identified by linking anonymous details in the data to other information that is…
Sun Microsystems has announced the completion of its $1 billion takeover of MySQL.
We’ve all heard the advice to take care with numbers, and not treat imprecise numbers as if they were precise. Here’s a cautionary tale from the New York Times, and public editor Clark Hoyt.
The heart-stopping ride for 83 passengers aboard Air Canada flight 190 from Victoria to Toronto Jan. 10 has raised questions about why the Airbus A319 pitched and yawed, throwing objects flying and injuring 10 people. The plane made an emergency landing in Calgary. There are many resources reporters can turn to to find background and…