A four-step check used before any claim makes it onto the Thesis page. The goal: tell the difference between the real reasons something happened and the excuses people give for it, and never treat "these two things happened at the same time" as proof one caused the other.
The overall score you see across the site, broken down piece by piece. The numbers below are calculated live by the same code that runs the homepage — nothing here is typed in by hand.
The four checks every question has to pass before we treat it as real analysis instead of just an opinion.
We only look at questions that can be tested against real numbers — things like physical limits, math, or a cause-and-effect relationship that could be proven wrong if the data didn't support it. We skip questions that are really just about people's opinions or intentions, because there's no way to prove those right or wrong with data.
Before we analyze anything, we spell out exactly what's being looked at: what goes in, what comes out, and what feeds back into the system. We also say upfront what result would prove us wrong. If we can't say what would prove us wrong, we don't treat it as a finished conclusion — we call it incomplete instead.
We set aside the official reasons given for a policy or outcome and instead look at the actual conditions that caused it — things like government finances, population makeup, or physical resource limits. Where we can, we show it as a direct chain: A causes B — instead of just saying "these two things are connected" without explaining how.
The real world doesn't move in straight lines, so we describe outcomes as likely or unlikely based on the data we have — not as guaranteed. We start from what's happened historically, add in the change we're studying, and describe what's probably coming next, without claiming to know the future for certain.
Most public discussion about Canada's problems is based on gut feeling or political spin. We're trying to stick to only what the data actually shows: real numbers tracked over decades, and cause-and-effect relationships you can check yourself against the source tables in the Data section. If new data proves a finding on the Thesis page wrong, we change it — every correction like that gets logged in the Changelog.
The 51 numbers tracked in the Data section are standard measurements that official agencies (Statistics Canada, OECD, IMF, Bank of Canada) already use to check a country's economic and social health. We didn't pick them because we expected them to show bad news — we picked them because they're the normal things experts check. The fact that most currently point toward stress is something the data showed us, not something we went looking for.
Everything on this site — charts, figures, and analysis — is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Use it, share it, build on it, commercial or not — just credit Northwatch and link back. The underlying government data we draw from (Statistics Canada, Finance Canada, etc.) carries its own open licensing, cited on each chart.
This page explains how we work, not what we found. For the actual findings from applying this to Canadian data, see the Thesis section. For the raw numbers, see the Data section.