Last week, the Trudeau government's increasing reliance on management consultants was a big story. So that had me turning to a database the government itself maintains that lists details information on more than 900,000 contracts the government has entered into going back to 2004.
But the dataset -- you can find it here - is really messy. 
For e.g., the names of vendors are inconsistently entered by a contracting department i.e.

There are problems with other fields as well where the original data entry has been inconsistent.

So my first task involved some heavy-duty data cleaning and, given my current skill level in R combined with real-world news deadlines, I turned to tools in Excel, BBEdit as well as R to get started.

And then, of course, I learned that someone had already written and posted a pile of R code that did all that heavy lifting.

Researchers with The School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa did that -- using R --  and posted the code for their project on Github.

For data geeks, data journalists, and those interested in those government contracts,  well worth reading through the project methodology.

... in 1975: Scott # B4: Olympic Games Semi-Postal Issues: Swimming. Design: Hal Wallis.

"The 1976 Montreal games were already colossally over budget during the planning years due to errors, strikes, and corruption," philatelist Daniel Arpin once wrote. "In an effort to raise desperately needed money, Canada issued Olympic semi-postal stamps for the first time  in its history. Unfortunately, stamps would never be able to riase the $1.5 billion needed to pay for these Olympics -- a debt finally paid off by mid-November 2006!"
The purpose of a semi-postal is to add a surcharge to each stamp -- the surcharge on this "Swimming stamp" is 2 cents in addition to the 8 cents needed for postage.
Canada Post continues to issue a semi-postal once a year. These days, the surcharge goes to Canada Post Community Foundation.