Sunday, May 12, 2019

March for Life 2019 - the numbers


As usual, the main stream media didn't bother to report on the March for Life this year. 

I did find Chief Political Correspondent for Global News David Akin's tweet about the March. Akin "reported" that 2,000-2,500 people attended the March.

I counted closer to 17,340 people at the March. (My similar count for the March of 2015 here.)

I videotaped the entire March as it progressed down Metcalfe Street.



Did Akin bother to do what a reporter should do when reporting on something, as in checking it out for himself? No. He thought taking a screenshot of a camera he wasn't holding, was an easier way to report to the entire country, how many people attended the March.


In my video clip you can see the entire march. It took longer than 22 minutes for the marchers to walk past me.

The march progressed down Metcalfe St, turned on Laurier (where I was standing), then turned up O'Connor, and back up to Parliament Hill. 

Metcalfe is three lanes wide. The density of people you see in the video remained fairly constant until the end. I would guess at least 1 person per square metre. A one lane road in Ottawa is 3.5 metres wide. That's 10.5 metres wide. It is 450 metres from Wellington to Laurier where I stood. It takes six minutes to walk this distance.

The area was therefore 450 X 10.5 or 4,725 square metres. That's 4,725 people in one screen shot from my video. This means the crowd changed 3.67 times (22 / 6) because every six minutes, different people filled the screen.

That's a total of 17,340 people. Is it a perfect calculation? Probably not. But it's a lot better than the calculation made by a lazy liberal journalist who took a screenshot of Parliament Hill at 1:00. Maybe if he had bothered to get out of his chair and actually go to the March he could have seen the crowds for himself.

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