Ken Rowan
Shortly after his retirement as a Chartered Professional Accountant and Licensed Insolvency Trustee in 2021, Ken Rowan sought to find a way to combine his 40-year knowledge of insolvency obtained through his mostly consumer insolvency practice with a desire to advance his programming skills. This was kick-started by a textbook, Analyzing Baseball Data with R, a 2019 text by Marchi, Albert & Baumer and published by CRC Press, gifted to Ken by his son.
This gave rise to countless hours hunched over a desk downloading and reformatting Insolvency Statistics in Canada from the Government of Canada’s Open Government portal. Of particular interest were the tables reporting monthly insolvencies by Forward Sortation Area. This was followed by consolidating monthly data over more than 10 years, improving his understanding of Canada’s 1600+ FSA structure, determining the FSA-makeup of cities and the city-makeup of Central Metropolitan Areas. With this initial data and newly formed knowledge of R programming, Ken developed a template to prepare monthly federal and provincial reports that visualized consumer insolvency trends.
Debtsgo.ca
Canada Consumer Insolvency Trends was born and publicized on the debtsgo.ca platform through monthly blog articles with reports from 2023 to 2024 still available at RPubs.com/debtsgo. Blog articles included commentary on insolvency beta, the provincial presence of LIT firms, the relationship of consumer insolvencies to taxable income, FSA consumer insolvencies per square kilometer, and others. An interactive analytical report prepared in the Shiny app showed insolvency volume trends by CMA, city, and FSA and permitted interactive moving averages. And about to be published in 2024 was a favourite analysis on efficient frontier which illustrated the optimal combination of neighbouring FSAs / cities on which LITs should consider re-allocating their marketing resources given statistical deviations in the numbers of filings, all in a manner similar to security analysis. But life happens and in 2024 what had been important was suddenly no longer.
debtsgo.ca, now resurrected, is an independent information platform created to improve access to structured, reliable information about Canada’s bankruptcy and insolvency system. The site emphasizes clarity, source-based responses, and responsible use of AI tools in professional and public education contexts.
BIA Navigator
The advent of AI was quickly followed by the embedding of chatbots on countless websites. Taking a course on AI taught by Juan Carlos Sanchez-Lozano through Concordia University and having been frustrated over many years when researching insolvency questions, Ken built a generative AI chatbot that would pull together various pieces of insolvency legislation to assist the insolvency profession. It remains a work-in-process.