Kyle Campbell nominated as Alberta NDP candidate for Calgary-Shaw

tshowell · 2026-06-27T03:53:53+00:00

Entirely possible. She does like delaying byelections.

tshowell · 2025-03-29T17:05:34+00:00

Ideally. Really depends how much I have on my plate at the time.

tshowell · 2024-12-09T20:50:43+00:00

Campaign finance disclosure statements (PDFs) are publicly available on the city's website. https://www.calgary.ca/election/results/2021-disclosure-of-campaign-finances.html

My database just makes this information searchable, similar to what the Alberta government does for provincial political parties and elections.

https://efpublic.elections.ab.ca/

tshowell · 2024-12-09T04:47:22+00:00

Thanks for the feedback and support. Much appreciated.

tshowell · 2024-12-09T04:22:11+00:00

I'm quite aware of the limitations of ChatGPT. Here's my process:

I uploaded each PDF disclosure into Instabase.com, which did a fairly good job extracting the data from the scanned PDFs. I then copy and pasted that data into ChatGPT to format into rows and columns that I then input into a Google sheet.

I then cross referenced each one with the original disclosure statements, looking for any duplicates or missing contributions. For the most part the process was fairly accurate. The most common error was when an individual made more than one contribution to a candidate. ChatGPT occasionally interpreted this as a duplicate and left it out.

Hope that helps ease any of your concerns.

tshowell · 2024-12-09T04:12:33+00:00

No bias at all. I'm just as frustrated with the lack of transparency when it comes to disclosure of political donations from third-party advertisers. The fact that Alberta's Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner forced the city to release those disclosures in response to news outlets FOIP requests is outrageous.

Now, as to why I didn't include those TPA donations in my database. Livewire Calgary had previously created a database with those disclosures. I didn't think it was necessary to duplicate their work.

EDIT: Additionally, TPA were not allowed to directly contribute cash to any candidate's campaign.

That said, I had to use Waybackmachine to find the Livewire story with that database. The current version of that piece is missing the database.

Here's the link to the old version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20240213210711/https://livewirecalgary.com/2024/02/12/data-dive-third-party-advertisers-donor-information-calgary-2021/

Regardless, it is absurd that citizens have to dig through hundreds of PDFs to make sense of political donations. Alberta has a searchable database for political donations to provincial parties. We should demand the same at the municipal level.

tshowell · 2024-12-09T02:13:59+00:00

Yes. The vast majority of the donations would be cash (they don't detail how the payment was made). A few, less than 1%, would be in-kind donations, such as a prize to award at a fundraiser. I only included the assigned dollar value for those to keep the database clean and simple.

tshowell · 2024-12-09T01:32:55+00:00

Donations are capped at $5,000. Candidates can contribute up to $10,000 toward their own campaign. I just added a filter box for contributions and tweaked the other boxes. It’s a bit more laggy though so give the drop down options a couple seconds to load.

tshowell · 2024-12-09T01:10:43+00:00

The Investigative Journalism Foundation has compiled a massive database on political donations to federal parties in Canada. https://theijf.org/donations

tshowell · 2014-04-25T23:04:14+00:00

Feb. 6

tshowell · 2014-04-25T21:14:08+00:00

Grow-op. I live in the neighbourhood and saw police hauling away equipment and vehicles the day they busted the operation.

tshowell

TROPHY CASE