Editorial standards

Primary sources first

Every figure has to trace back to the body that published it. We go to the source before anyone's summary of it:

• The Canada Revenue Agency, Finance Canada, the Receiver General, the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
• Statistics Canada.
• The Government of Alberta and Elections Alberta.
• Courts, officers and commissioners of Parliament, and Hansard or committee evidence. Spoken testimony counts.

A citation names the document and the page, table or section that holds the number. A landing page on its own is not a citation. Think tanks and news outlets can be cited, but their figures are labelled as analysis or reporting, never passed off as official data.

One registry for every number

Every figure goes into one data registry. Each entry records the value, the publisher, the document, the exact locator, a link, the date we accessed it, and its status: actual, preliminary, forecast, estimate or scenario.

Per-person figures, rates and shares are computed from those entries in code, never typed by hand, and the formula is published with them. The same rule covers page titles, share images and share text. The Sources page lists every entry. How the tax calculator works, formula by formula, is on the methodology page.

Forecasts, projections and scenarios

• An official forecast is labelled with who made it and when.
• When we project a figure ourselves, it is labelled as a drained.ca scenario, with its assumptions stated and an official projection beside it where one exists.
• A live counter that carries an audited figure forward to today is an estimate, and is labelled as one.
• We hold past official forecasts up against what actually happened.

Disagreeing with a government forecast is not an error. Getting a number wrong is.

Testing official claims

We test what governments say against what governments publish. We do not drop a claim because it is unpopular or disputed. A claim changes when a primary source contradicts it, and when it changes, it is replaced with a sourced figure rather than quietly deleted. If a claim is missing a citation, we look for one first.

Corrections

If you think a figure is wrong, email [email protected] with the page, the figure and, if you have one, the source that contradicts it. We check it against the primary source. If we got it wrong, we fix it and log the correction with the date, what was wrong, what changed and the source.

Updates are not corrections: when a newer official release replaces a figure, the page shows the new figure and its review date moves, but nothing was wrong, so nothing is logged. Every correction is listed on the corrections page.

Point of view and independence

Drained has a point of view and says so. Some pages argue a position, most directly The Case for Alberta. Those pages are held to the same sourcing rules as everything else.

Drained is not affiliated with any political party. More about who we are is on the About page.