When Dave McVetty began the Recreation and Leisure Studies program at the University of Waterloo in the early 1980s, there was no such thing as the Internet. Desktop computers were in the early stages of being introduced into offices.
But McVetty (BA ’87, Recreation and Leisure Studies) ended up becoming an expert in the gathering and management of data.
After 34 years with Parks Canada, most recently in roles that involved leading data strategy teams, he has just started a newly created position as manager of the data centre of expertise at Employment and Social Development Canada.
It is an unusual trajectory for someone in recreation and leisure studies, and McVetty certainly didn’t start out thinking that data management might be his life-long career.
When he came to Waterloo’s program from the Niagara region, he thought he might end up becoming a recreation director. Soon, he began helping professors who needed help in their research projects. “I needed the money, so I started off doing some very basic data entry and phone interviews to gather information.”
From there, his interest in data just grew. “I began taking courses from these same professors on research methods and statistics,” McVetty says. “Computers were new in workplaces at the time but I realized that this was an opportunity to turn something I liked doing into a career. I thank Waterloo for that, because if I had gone to any of the other schools for recreation, I may not have had the opportunity to realize that.”
Hooked on data
After he graduated, he went to work for Parks Canada, where computers had recently been introduced. Many on the staff found those computers to be clumsy and frustrating, but McVetty’s experience at Waterloo made him the go-to help person.
In one of his early roles at Parks Canada, he helped the department figure out a strategy for how to count visitors to national parks and historic sites. “That sounds simple but it wasn’t,” McVetty says. At the time, there wasn’t a good way of doing it at Thousand Islands National Park, especially when there were no gates. He developed a study to count people and match them to the garbage collected by cleaning staff. “Assuming that people generate garbage at roughly the same rate, all we had to do was count the number of garbage bags and that gave us a rough estimate of the attendance.”
From there, McVetty got hooked on how data could be turned into useful information that can inform program policies and decisions.
He ended up getting involved in socio-economic research that generated economic impact studies and feasibility studies for new parks projects. Eventually he became the manager of social science for Western and Northern Canada and then took on roles that involved analyzing data to help the department become more efficient and make better decisions about the use of resources.
Carve out a new role
His new role involves helping the managers in Employment and Social Development Canada co-ordinate information gathering and make better use of labour data. People in different parts of the department are often gathering data that can be repurposed for other uses if the right questions are asked. As manager of the data centre of expertise, “my role really is helping to provide that infrastructure so that they can ask those questions, and get the answers.”
Since the position was just recently created, “the exciting challenge is in carving out this new role,” he says.
McVetty strongly believes that data can be used to provide better service to Canadians. That’s impact that he hopes his work will have had at the end of the day.
“I want to make sure that the programs that the government provides are not only doing what they’re supposed to do, but will pleasantly surprise people in terms of how nimble they can be, how responsive they can be, and how the money can be spent to have the biggest impact."
