Data Sources

Every source behind the site, what it is used for, and its licence

Everything on Canada Observatory comes from an authoritative primary source. Every chart carries its own source note; this page is the full roster.

Canadian official sources

  • Statistics Canada: the backbone of the site. Population estimates and components, the 2021 Census (diversity, religion, incomes, and home values down to the census-tract and dissemination-area level), the Consumer Price Index, the New Housing Price Index, incomes and low income, food insecurity, labour force series, housing starts and rental vacancy (CMHC data published through Statistics Canada), electricity generation, university tuition, crime (the Uniform Crime Reporting survey, the Crime Severity Index, and hate crime), substance use (the Canadian Community Health Survey), adult literacy and numeracy (PIAAC), government finance and employment, federal science spending and personnel, merchandise trade, and homeownership by age (the census tenure tables and two analytical studies, on the life course and on the generations). Used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.
  • Environment and Climate Change Canada: greenhouse-gas emissions (the National Inventory Report), the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (temperature change, air-quality concentrations), the Air Pollutant Emissions Inventory, raw air-quality monitoring from the National Air Pollution Surveillance program (back to 1974), homogenized long-run city temperatures (AHCCD), regional warming trends, and the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (protected areas and parks). Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • Public Health Agency of Canada: the Substance-Related Harms dataset behind the Substance Use page: apparent opioid- and stimulant-toxicity deaths and hospitalizations, national and by province, updated quarterly. Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • Bank of Canada: the policy rate back to 1935, mortgage rates, bond yields, and the exchange rate, via the Valet API. The exchange rate’s history before 2017, monthly averages of the Bank’s noon rate from 1950, comes from Statistics Canada’s archived table 10-10-0009-01. Reproduced with attribution as the Bank requires.
  • Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada: the monthly operational open data behind the Immigration page: new permanent residents by category and source country, study and work permits, and asylum claims. Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada: refugee-protection decisions, behind the asylum acceptance rate chart on the Immigration page. Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • Elections Canada: federal voter turnout since 1867 (reproduced with attribution from its published tables) and turnout by age group (Open Government Licence – Canada), on the Citizenship page.
  • Natural Resources Canada: the Canadian National Fire Database (wildfire), the Atlas of Canada (major lakes and rivers, permafrost), elevation and named peaks, the Aboriginal Lands of Canada legislative boundaries (Canada Lands Survey System), and the hillshade basemap on the Elevation page. Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and GC InfoBase: federal public service headcounts and demographics, and federal spending by department and standard object. Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • Canadian Institute for Health Information: surgical wait times (the share of patients treated within the pan-Canadian benchmark), updated annually from CIHI’s published data tables.
  • Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: the National Ecological Framework behind the ecozone maps.
  • Toronto Police Service: the neighbourhood crime map and crime-seasonality charts on the Crime & Safety page. Open Government Licence – Ontario.
  • Department of National Defence: Regular Force strength by fiscal year from the open-data table Canadian Armed Forces Regular Force Members by Rank (Open Government Licence – Canada), the current Regular Force and Primary Reserve figures from the State of the Canadian Armed Forces page, and the Primary Reserve’s average paid strength from the annual Departmental Results Reports; the 1962–1986 Regular Force points come from Statistics Canada’s Canada Year Book.

International sources

  • Department of Finance Canada: the Fiscal Reference Tables, the department’s annual compilation of the federal public accounts (total liabilities, financial assets, net debt, the accumulated deficit, and its share of GDP) from 1966-67, published each autumn. They carry the modern end of the federal debt since Confederation chart; the years before 1983-84 come from Statistics Canada’s historical table and the GDP denominator before 1961 from its Historical Statistics of Canada. Open Government Licence – Canada.
  • OECD: the engine of the peer comparisons: GDP per capita and growth, productivity, jobs, house prices, household debt and disposable income, inequality and poverty, wages, government debt, deficits, revenue and interest costs, life expectancy, health spending and system capacity (beds, physicians, nurses, MRI units), R&D and researchers, fine-particle air pollution, CO₂, and general-government employment. Accessed through the OECD’s SDMX API. Adult skills (the PIAAC Survey of Adult Skills) come from the published data annex of the OECD’s 2023-cycle report, reproduced with attribution.
  • OECD PISA: mean reading, mathematics, and science scores of 15-year-olds by cycle since 2000, Canada, the peer countries, and the OECD averages, from the annex tables of the PISA results volumes. Reproduced with attribution per OECD terms.
  • Council of Ministers of Education, Canada: the provincial PISA scores, every cycle since 2000, from the trend tables of its official Canadian reports, Measuring Up, published with Employment and Social Development Canada and Statistics Canada. The latest cycle is checked against the OECD’s own regional annex. Reproduced with attribution.
  • World Bank: peer comparisons sourced from WHO, UN, and IDF data: business investment, suicide, overweight, tobacco and alcohol use, diabetes, maternal mortality, universal-health-coverage index, and out-of-pocket health spending. CC BY 4.0.
  • SIPRI: military expenditure as a share of GDP, Canada and the peer countries, 1949 onward. Information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database, https://doi.org/10.55163/CQGC9685. SIPRI permits non-commercial reproduction of less than 10 per cent of a data set with that credit line; our extract is 17 countries of one measure.
  • Our World in Data: the energy mix (compiled from the Energy Institute, Ember, and the U.S. EIA), consumption-based CO₂ (Global Carbon Project), the long-run Canadian life-expectancy series (Human Mortality Database) that carries our century chart back to 1921, and the Correlates of War military-personnel series (1920 onward) behind the armed-forces charts. CC BY.
  • Ember: yearly electricity generation and installed capacity by source, Canada and the peer countries, behind the generation-by-source chart. For Canada, Ember compiles generation from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review and Statistics Canada’s monthly data (the fossil total split into coal and gas with IEA fuel ratios), and capacity from Global Energy Monitor and IRENA. CC BY 4.0.
  • World Happiness Report: life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll and the factors that statistically account for them.
  • United Nations Peace and Security Data Hub: uniformed personnel in UN peace operations by contributing country, mission, and personnel type, monthly since November 1990, mirrored on the Humanitarian Data Exchange; the peers’ assessed shares of the peacekeeping budget come from the General Assembly’s scale of assessments. CC BY-IGO. Canada’s pre-1990 missions and its NATO-led and other non-UN deployments are approximate strengths transcribed from DND’s official operation histories, each with its source.
  • NATO: military personnel of the eleven NATO members in our peer group, from Table 7 of the annual Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries release (NATO’s peacetime-strength definition; the latest two years are NATO estimates). Reproduced with attribution.
  • National Snow and Ice Data Center: the Sea Ice Index behind the Arctic sea-ice extent chart.
  • Copernicus Climate Change Service (ECMWF): the ERA5-Land reanalysis behind the temperature maps: continuous ~9 km temperature fields covering all of Canada, 1950 to the present. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information; used under the Copernicus licence with attribution.

One charts-only exception

  • CREA (Canadian Real Estate Association): The MLS® Home Price Index series on the Housing page are published as charts only, with CREA’s written permission for educational use. Unlike every other source on this site, the underlying CREA data is not redistributed and is not available in our downloads. Each of those charts carries CREA’s attribution line. CREA’s permission to use their data is appreciated.

Licences, in short

Canadian government sources are used under the Open Government Licence – Canada (or the equivalent Statistics Canada and Ontario licences); the World Bank and Our World in Data are CC BY; the OECD permits reproduction with attribution, as do the Bank of Canada and the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Everything except the CREA series may be redistributed, and our cleaned CSVs are free to download.

How fresh is each series?

The pipeline checks its sources daily, and most series refresh automatically as their agencies publish. This varies by source. e.g., it’s monthly for the CPI, quarterly for population, annually for most OECD series. A few sources have no machine-readable feed and are rebuilt manually about once a year when their agency publishes (CIHI wait times, the by-city air-quality history, the substance-use survey, detailed crime tables). Census-based maps are rebuilt once per census. (The release of the 2026 Census throughout 2027 will be a major opportunity to discuss Canadian data.) Every chart shows the date of its most recent observation.