Our Latest Projects
PATRON's projects put computational methods to work on the questions that shape Canadian democracy — electoral systems, political finance, and democratic participation — and share the resulting tools, data, and findings openly.
MaRiPoSa
Electoral District Boundary Effects in Canada
Electoral redistricting in single-member plurality systems requires drawing boundaries that satisfy competing legal, geographic, and demographic constraints. We introduce the fractionalized rasterization process, and the Markov Riding Position Sampler (MaRiPoSa).
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Team Projects
Active research projects led by PATRON Lab team members, applying computational methods to questions of electoral systems, political finance, and democratic participation in Canada.
Redistricting
Boundary Responsiveness Across Five Federal Elections
We analyze fairness across multiple Canadian federal elections (2011–2025). Do boundary-dependent outcomes reflect systematic patterns or isolated anomalies?
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Deep Learning
Deep Learning, and Canadian Environmental Governance
Large-scale development projects in Canada have transformed landscapes in ways that often escape public view—deliberately and systematically shielded from visibility.
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Hansard
Disability Discourse in the Canadian House of Commons
How do elected representatives talk about people with disabilities? We extract a context window around our disability-term mentions and analyze the Canadian Hansard.
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AI/LLMs
What Happens When AI Simulates the Electorate?
Falling response rates in survey research have prompted a recent proposal that AI language models can stand in for human respondents—"silicon sampling".
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Redistricting
The MaRiPoSa Redistribution Modernization Platform (MRMP)
We present the MaRiPoSa Redistribution Modernization Platform (MRMP), an open-source, full-stack web application designed to support the upcoming redistribution.
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Bayesian
Canadian Federal Government Procurement and Election Timing
The project introduces a dataset from the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) that can be used to assess Canadian government procurement practices.
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Donations
Does Political Geography Create Donation Dead Zones in Canada?
Do donations decrease as the concentration of a racial group within a geographic area increases? Does reduced proximity to active donor networks weaken donating?
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Programming
The Qualitative Turn in Quantitative Social Science
The practical constraints that long sustained the qualitative-quantitative divide in social science—scarce data, inaccessible tools, and narrow technical expertise—are dissolving.
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Legal NER
Americanization of the Supreme Court of Canada? Legal-NER
Named-entity recognition (NER) tools available for Canadian legal corpora are limited, and developing these tools is a non-trivial task. We detail our efforts here.
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Other Projects
Additional research initiatives and collaborative projects extending PATRON's work on Canadian governance, civic data infrastructure, and democratic institutions.
The Digitization of Canada’s Founding Debates (1867–1871)
Jackman Humanities Institute: Scholars-in-Residence
May 2026
Following the Money: Mapping Networks of Influence in Government Contracting
Jackman Humanities Institute: Scholars-in-Residence
May 2026
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