A Memorial
While working as Director of the Nova Scotia Statistics Agency, Dennis initiated planning for Nova Scotia Community Counts (NSCC). He subsequently worked full-time to provide strategic direction and leadership for development of Nova Scotia Community Counts. The system, launched in 2005, was a statistical infrastructure that provided easy access to community-level data. It enabled government, business and community organizations to understand the opportunities and challenges they face and became widely used for planning programs, services and delivery mechanisms. The system required extensive modelling of Statistics Canada and other data to provide information at the community level.
In 2009, Dennis received the Premier’s Award of Excellence for his leadership of this work. In 2015, the Government discontinued supporting this resource and deleted the website. This was done with no notice and no consultation. Many people from within and outside of the government continue to express concern about the loss of easy access to community level data. As of April 30, 2018, some of the underlying data from NSCC was available from the Nova Scotia Data Portal.
DWPilkey Consulting is able to provide some of the functions that were available from this comprehensive easy to use resource. This includes community and neighbourhood statistical profiles and related thematic maps.