New Liberal Party Elected Prompts Decline in Marijuana Possession Incidents

Prior to legalization talks in Canada, marijuana related incidents began to decline across many provinces beginning in 2015.

In 2015, the new Liberal government that was surging to attempt to take power within the government, held a strong platform that they would be legalizating marijuana across Canada if they were elected into power.

According to Statistics Canada, as reported by the CTV, in 2016 alone they had recorded 55,000 incidents related to marijuana possession which was down from the year prior by about 6,000. Which is not ultimately surprising as this was when the new Liberal government was in power and legalization in places like Oregon and Colorado foreshadowed what Canada’s future would look like.

This was not the case for all provinces in Canada, however. In many of the maritime provinces and territories, they began to see an increase in incidents being reported since 2008. In places like Prince Edward Island saw a 38% increase from 2008 to 2015. According to Statistics Canada, in 2008 they saw 68 incidents and rose to 98 total incidents in 2015.

For places like the Northwest Territories, although they did not see a large decrease in incidents, they were ranked the highest frequency of incidents out of the territories in 2015. In an article written by CBC, they attribute their numbers to “good police work, as well as a large number of people who self-medicate untreated childhood trauma.” Although the police question if they are doing more harm than good when people are using the marijuana for medicinal reasons. With that being said, it is also worth noting the conviction rate is 19% lower than the national average.

Looking closer to home, BC had the largest decrease in marijuana incidents with a -16.8% difference from ’08 to ’15. In an article published in The Straight, in Vancouver while the numbers looked to have gone down according to reports, they really have not gone down all that significantly. What has gone down is the amount of charges that are laid. The constable interviewed within the article stated that “When an officer does catch somebody smoking a joint…the most likely outcome would be for them to destroy the drugs but otherwise let that citizen go about their day.” Although this is not a charge this incident is still to be reported to crime statistics. As the election came to a close in 2015, with a large stance with legalization it is normal to see these arrests decline as they know what was coming.

After looking at the data and seeing all the information within the articles that I have found, it more and more clear that politics play more of a role within arrest and marijuana. Stephen Harper held a very strong stance against marijuana throughout his tenure in power and Justin Trudeau, along with the NDP, took a strong opposing stance to that highly in favor of legalization. What we see after the talks of legalization happen is the provinces and more importantly the policing standards change and what it is they are really looking for when protecting the communities.

For more information on the data provided, please visit Statistics Canada here

Data Visualization: Update #3

 Chart:

This chart is based on information that would show the percentage change with marijuana possession charges from 2008 to 2015.

Unanswered question:

One unanswered question from this chart is why the maritime provinces do not show a decrease in possession charges where it seems most of the other provinces do. Now this could be because the sample of people is smaller than other provinces but it seems to be consistent throughout much of the provinces on the eastern coast.

How would I get this data?

I think I would need to be more focused on those areas. Look at their specific arrest records to find out if there is a pattern in the arrests. This could be obtained by FOI to each police department for criminal records and arrests in relation to marijuana possession. I would also look at court records based on marijuana cases to see how many of these charges have lead to convictions.

Data Visualization Update #2

 Lead:

New political power prompts a decrease in marijuana possession offences after strong legalization stance during their campaign.

Excel workbook link and explanation:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q50RONeT5q2zP45bngoKAvZxrJUMIU4D/view?usp=sharing

The slice that I created was a look at specifically the "Possession, Pre-legalization" offences across all provinces. Looking at the data once re-worked by a pivot table, I noticed the largest decrease began in 2015 and 2016. Using 2016, I then calculated the percentage change from 2008-2016 in the final column to see just how much it has changed.

Dataset Link:

Here is a link to the dataset I am using: https://bit.ly/3bm0Xi6. It is slightly different from before as I adjusted the information to take into account feedback provided as well as increasing the reference period by two years.

News Article: 

In almost all provinces, there was a decrease in possession charges starting 2015-2016. After further investigation, CBC reported the same findings that I did and confirmed the assumption that I had which was this decrease since the Liberal party had taken power. Here is a link to the article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cannabis-offences-statistics-canada-1.4216688. While legalization did not happen until 2018, they campaigned so strongly for legalization that it looks to have brought total arrest numbers down.

JRNL 3165: Data Visualization Update #1

What dataset will you use for your final report? (title of your dataset, include a link to it and claim it at the URL above).

The data set that I will be using is from Statistics Canada and it is titled "2010-2019 Violations Involving Marijuana in Canada." Here is a shortened link for the data:https://bit.ly/3tDk7qX

Describe the dataset. What kind of data does it contain?


Looking at the dataset with all the filters that are available, there is so much information that is present. So I decided to narrow it down to:

• Actual Incidents
• Rate per 100,000 population
• Cleared by Charge
• Cleared otherwise

The offences that I chose to really focus in my results are:

• Possession of Cannabis (pre-legalization)
• Possession of illicit or over 30g dried cannabis (or equivalent) by adult
• Possession of over 5g dried cannabis (or equivalent) by youth

All of this data is broken out into a province specific segment as well.

Is there anything about your data that you don’t understand? (i.e what a column heading means). How will you find this out?

One column that appears is “cleared otherwise” which I assume is about their charges. But I will look through the website to see if I can find a clear definition of what that means or potentially look through court decisions to see if there is additional information.

What are some questions you hope to answer with your data?

Some questions I would like to answer would be:

• What province had the most possession violations over the 10-year span?
• During what years did we see the largest decrease and increase in violations (excluding the legalization year of 2018-2019)?
• Which province has the highest average number of incidents per 100,000 people?

JRNL 3165 : Analyzing Visuals From "Film or Digital?" by Damar Aji Pramudita

 

In the article "Film or Digital?" by Damar Aji Pramudita, they aim to look at the preferred shooting type of Hollywood's biggest directors. There are quite a few charts and visuals that are aimed to explain the data that was collected, but the particular one that caught my eye was a dot type graph that, based on the size of the dot, represents the amount of movies that have been made with the categories being digital, film, or both. Here is an example of the graph:

This is an interactive graph that further clarifies what this graph means and provides some highlights from the information. When clicking through the interactive piece, you provided more connection to each of these dot groups and what they mean. I found this graph hard to grasp without the interactive piece just because of the format that it is in. The dots represent a number but to my eye some of these dots could have sit in between the scale so it was difficult to have an accurate baseline. For additional context, here is the graph once all interactive slides have been added in:

As you can see, the lines are now added in and we can somewhat visualize what this information is trying to tell us. However, I still find that if I was asked to provide answers to any sort of question on it, it would be difficult to give any detailed answer. Without the interactive piece to this chart, I do not feel that this would have been as valuable of a chart. That said, looking at the amount of information this may have bee the best option to capture all of what they wanted.

If given the opportunity to make this into a different chart, I would think that a simple set of bar graphs with a scale on it would be easier to read through and understand. The information provided in the interactive portion was more just "did you know?" type facts so this could have been simplified. It could also provide more detail so that if a question was asked the information could be easily called on.

The above visual is appealing and fun because of the interactive piece. You can hover over one of the lines and it will provide more detail into what that line is connected to and almost like a fun fact that is related to it. The interactive portion is what makes this visual work for this piece of writing.

A link to this article can be found here: https://pudding.cool/2018/08/filmordigital/