Ken Rowan
Shortly after his retirement as a Chartered Professional Accountant and Licensed Insolvency Trustee in 2021, Ken 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 the textbook, Analyzing Baseball Data with R, a 2019 text by Marchi, Albert & Baumer and published by CRC Press.
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 Census 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 efficient frontier analysis of securities. What one can do with data! 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.
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.
Canadian Insolvency Data Explorer
This interactive dashboard allows one to explore the monthly trend history of consumer proposals and consumer bankruptcies by FSA, city, and census metropolitan area. It can soften monthly variations and reveal longer term trends by enabling you to choose moving averages. This dashboard will show the historical trend, the summary of filings including the recent 12-month average, the prior 12-month average, the year over year growth rate, the volatility, and the most dominate FSAs. Try it – it’s fun to play with!