I don’t have strong opinions about the propriety of the PNP program.
I do, however, have strong opinions about what it means for a government to “release data.”
The Province of PEI“complied” with a court order to release the names of companies that received investment under the Provincial Nominee Program by releasing a PDF file on its website.
PDF, while certainly readable on a variety of digital devices, is not “open data” in any real sense.
To solve that issue, I ran the PDF file through pdftotext and then stripped out the page headers with a text editor using regular expressions.
The result is pnp.txt, a simple ASCII text file with the 1,354 company names from the PDF.
Update: I’ve merged the PNP data with the 2008 OpenCorporations.org data and 933 matches (69% of the PNP companies); you can download this as pnp_plus.csv (comma-delimited ASCII) or pnp_plus.xml (XML). Or search with this tool.
Update: I’ve merged the PNP data with the 2008 OpenCorporations.org data and included the shareholders and officers of the company, getting 2708 matches. Use with caution, as this data is 4 years old now, and shareholders and officers listed were not necessarily in place when PNP investment was received. Download this as pnp_people.csv (comma-delimited ASCII). Or search with this tool.
