Open Data Canada

About

A public archive of charts, maps, 3D visualizations, and longform explainers built from Canadian government and statistical sources.

Open Data Canada exists to make the figures published by Statistics Canada, Health Canada, the Bank of Canada, the Canada Energy Regulator, the Natural Resources Canada wildfire database, and other Canadian public bodies easier to read at a glance and easier to verify against the source. Material is organised into seven categories — Economy, Population & Migration, Health, Housing, Government, Justice, and Environment — and is browsable from the navigation on every page.

What we publish

Charts, maps, and 3D visualizations are single-data-point pictures published with the source citation, the methodology, and a link to the original government table where the figures can be retrieved. Articles are longform explainers that walk through what the picture does and does not support, engage directly with the methodology objections that real readers raise, and place the figures in the context that a chart caption can't carry.

The site does not break news, run interviews, or publish opinion pieces unconnected to a specific dataset.

Where the data comes from

Every figure on this site traces back to a named primary source.

Statistics Canada — population, labour, GDP, prices, demographics, trade
Health Canada Health Infobase — mortality, surveillance, substance harms
Bank of Canada — interest rates, exchange rates, monetary policy
open.canada.ca — federal datasets, budgets, contracts
CMHC — housing starts, rents, vacancy
Canada Energy Regulator — oil, gas, LNG, electricity exports and infrastructure
Natural Resources Canada — National Fire Database — wildfire perimeter and statistics
Elections Canada — voting, registration, riding-level results
Environment and Climate Change Canada — emissions, air quality, climate
UN Comtrade — international trade statistics, used for cross-country comparisons

Charts that draw on third-party syntheses (think tank reports, peer-reviewed papers, peer-country benchmarks like the CDC or OECD) name and link the underlying source.

Editorial position

Articles will sometimes take a position about how data should be interpreted — for example, when a national-average comparison fails to survive a province-level breakdown, or when a single-cause framing collapses under a multi-driver decomposition. That is a position about whether a comparison is meaningful, not about whether the underlying outcome is good or bad. Where reasonable disagreement remains on a value question, the article states the trade-off and stops there.

Visualizations are published whether or not they support a popular position. If a chart points in an inconvenient direction, that is the chart, not a mistake.

Corrections

Methodology errors, outdated numbers, or missing caveats can be raised on r/OpenDataCanada. Material corrections are versioned and noted on the affected page; misleading visualizations are clarified or, in extreme cases, withdrawn with a link to the corrected version.

Discussion