IOTO

Overview

This project will track and evaluate parliamentary members and their involvement and activities on environment protection and sustainable development. It will leverage public data with tools such as sentiment analysis to draw conclusions on these topics. The evaluation will focused on data from 2021 (or 2022, depending on availability) and we will start by looking at the activities of the members of Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

Data Sources

Data from Parliament sittings and legislation bills

Data is scraped (or has already been scraped) for the specific year on the conversations in the parliament sittings. The features in the scraped data include Unix time, parliament member name, speech text, party, constituency, province. The data will be processed for topics level 2 and 1, and sentiment score.

Data from the committees regarding who is involved in which committee

• committee’s list

Committees are categorized based on sectors that can be mapped to topics. Among committees there is Environment and Sustainable Development. The website shows who is involved with the committee. It is suggested to start with members of Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development and expand to other members of the parliament. Their activities such as voting and proposing legislations in the committee is used as a measure on their performance.

Expenses data for Canada

• Expenses Data

Emission data

• Greenhouse gas emission by sector

• This website is an example of demonstrating data of greenhouse gas emission in Canada.

• Climate Action Tracker has historical data in Canada which is in MtCO2e/year and AR4 GWPs, excluding LULUCF (Land Use, Land-use Change and Forestry). More in depth study needed here.

Data sources will be added as the research proceeds.

Skills

• Data cleaning and wrangling
• Machine learning
• Visualization

References

• Measurement and Causal Inference Using Text as Data - This video provides an introductory overview which may be of some use to project participants.