The title says it all. Gilles Séguin, a retired federal public servant, has compiled an unbelievably vast collection of links on social research in Canada. From education to health care to First Nations to housing… it’s like a Yahoo! of Canadian social policy.

This clearly takes a lot of time. Why’s he doing it? Here are two of the 10 reasons he offers:

8. Levelling the playing field – too much Fraser Institute and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, not enough Canadian Council on Social Development and Campaign 2000…

7. Therapy. I’m an empty nester – my only son’s in Montreal (see #5) – and my Mom passed away on January 27, 2005 after a journey of almost 10 years that started with a massive stroke in the fall of 1995. She experienced first-hand the effects of mid-to-late-nineties cuts to health and long-term care spending by the federal and Ontario governments. She’s gone to a far better place than Mike Harris and Ernie Eves could ever prepare for her.

(My only complaint: there’s so damn much here — over 200 pages and 20,000 bookmarks as of a year ago, and as far as I can tell, all manually coded. If someone ever hooked Gilles up with a Drupal installation and a half hour of orientation around tagging, something tells me he’d have the whole thing wired in no time… and his bookmarks much more easily entered, catalogued and searched.)

I’m in awe of how much work has gone into this. And I can tell I’ll be coming back a lot.