This handy sheet gives the current Canada Post and USPS postage rates for basic letters between the USA and Canada. I've exported the spreadsheet as an easily printable PDF file. Print it out for a handy quick reference card, which you can keep next to your stamps or your postage scale. You can also modify the source spreadsheet. Both source and PDF edition are licensed CC-BY-SA.

 

n.b. January 2012: I have not yet revised this sheet to reflect the Canada Post rate increases effective 16 January, 2012 or the USPS rate increases effective 22 January, 2012 . The update is in my work queue, but I haven't got to it yet.

Update April 2011: reflects USPS rate increases effective 17 April, 2011.

Update January 2011: reflects Canada Post rate increases effective 17 January, 2011. 

... a data analysis by two non-partisan software engineers from Vancouver. 

by Jim DeLaHunt <http://jdlh.com>, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , @jdlh; and Kaitlin Duck Sherwood <http://maps.webfoot.com>, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

 

The media are, as of October 2009, running stories like, “Stimulus program favours Tory ridings” (Globe&Mail), “Liberal, NDP ridings getting more than fair share…: analysis” (National Post). We’re engineers; we’re non-partisan; we wanted to see the data. The Government of Canada has a stimulus program website with some reports and an API. We wrote come code, called the API, captured the data including latigude and longitude for each of 6,424 projects. We used Ducky’s maps.webfoot.com’s geoinformatics tools to identify which riding contained the lat/long for each project. We made a big spreadsheet, and cross-tabluated by MP’s party and by province.

 

There are two chapters to this tale.   First, we think the news reports are missing the real disproportionality story in Canada’s stimulus money allocations, at least as revealed in this data. Second, this is a wonderful example of how open government data can empower citizens. More on both below.