It's not so hard for us, because we have 600 communities spread around 6,000 miles of coastline, and almost every one of them is separated from every other community. So basically our approach to defining a community is: it's Fogo, it's Harbour Grace, it's whatever. That hasn't been a problem for us at all.
That's one of the reasons we did the neighbourhoods. It's easy to do the communities themselves, but then people are interested in the larger areas, such as, if you know Newfoundland—some people here certainly do—the larger communities of Corner Brook, St. John's, and Clarenville. So we broke those into neighbourhoods of 1,000 population, and we did that with residents of those neighbourhoods as well, by the way. We had consultations with them and discussions. They essentially designed the neighbourhoods, but then we superimposed Statistics Canada geography over those so we could standardize the approaches, and so on, that we made.
I would like to just respond a little bit to some of the points that you made.
The geospatial aspect of it is critical and at our statistics agency we have very strong geospatial capacity there. One of the reasons it's so important is that I find in Newfoundland and Labrador—and I would predict that there's not much difference elsewhere—that what you said is absolutely right. Most people don't care about the macrodata. Obviously governments care, because we have to do our best to manage our economies and we have to have those indicators. But what really means a lot to people in communities and neighbourhoods is to take a look at data about themselves. We found that to be very....
The way we've always looked at it is that when you think about economic or social development, putting data into that equation is a very powerful new thing to add there. But if you deliver the data at the right level and in the right forums—we call it accessible, which means you can understand it and it's easy to get, easy to manipulate, that sort of thing—you actually turn people, who may not have much in the way of quantitative background at all, into experts. If I tell somebody in Arnold's Cove what the unemployment rate is in Arnold's Cove, they have a number that begins to put a dimension around their community. But they're experts on that, because they know what's happening to the guy next door. They know who's going to Alberta, they know who's working in the fish plant, and so on and so forth.
We've taken that kind of an approach for getting data into people's hands at the micro-level. I really believe that the buzzwords that we hear about evidence-based decision-making, and all that sort of thing. I think that the secret is moving in there at the micro-level and making data available to people in a way that it means something to them, so that they can actually start thinking that way and understand an awful lot more, and for that matter understand what governments are dealing with, because we have to deal with the realities. Lots of times people don't have enough information to know what the realities are and the dimensions of that in the same way that we do.