Open Data: The One Cause
Canada Observatory does not take policy positions. We show the numbers, the peer comparison, and the official benchmark, and leave the exploration, judgment, and advocacy to you. It is genuinely difficult to nail down the ‘right’ number for many issues. What is important is that Canadians have informed conversations about how we move from where we are now to where we want to be.
We make one deliberate exception: we advocate for the creation, use, and open availability of high-quality public data. Every chart on this site exists because an organization (often a public agency) counted something carefully and published the result for anyone to use. Open data is a foundation of informed civic discussion. We need a shared factual ground for the country’s debates.
Why it matters
The principles motivating this project are important and widely supported:
- Transparency. Citizens can only evaluate how the country is doing, hold institutions to account, and discuss shared goals if the measuring is done accurately and the results are published for everyone.
- Informed civic engagement. Discussion is healthy and disagreement can be, too. However, arguing from different facts is not productive. A shared, citable base of evidence gives us a foundation to stand on. Discussion can then be about values, priorities, goals, and trade-offs.
- Value. Data collected once at public expense should be as accessible as possible to Canadians, as well as to researchers, journalists, businesses, community groups, and sites like this one. This only works if it is open, machine-readable, and free.
More specifically
Creation. Statistical agencies need the mandate, independence, and funding to measure the country rigorously and continuously. Statistics Canada is internationally respected, and the census is one of the most critical sources of this site. That public data collection and quality is a choice that has to keep being made. The clearest illustration of the stakes is in our own charts: the 2011 census cycle replaced the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary survey. The response rates fell and the data quality suffered. Wherever 2011 appears in our census-based series, we flag it as the lower-quality point in the line. When data collection weakens, the damage never fully heals. It’s important for Canadians to support the collection of high quality data about our country.
Open access. Publication should be the default: machine-readable formats, open licences, stable links, free of charge. Canada has made real progress through the Open Government Licence, Statistics Canada’s bulk tables and APIs, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s indicator program, the Bank of Canada’s Valet API, and municipal open-data portals like the one this site’s Toronto crime maps are built on. Where data exists but sits behind restrictive licensing, the public conversation is worse for it.
Use. The final step of openness is making data usable: cleaned, documented, available, and visualized. That is part of what Canada Observatory aims to contribute. We aggregate official sources into one consistent, continually updated reference, cite everything, and publish our cleaned datasets and code so anyone can check or build on our work.
Transparently acknowledging limitations
When a dataset has limitations, we aim to note that on the chart or surrounding text. When a source is discontinued or degraded, we note it, too. We also do not grade governments on anything, even though we do show rankings on many of the variables presented.
If you agree
Use the data. Share the charts. Use it to discuss how we can create a better Canada. Also, every chart here links to its source. Download our cleaned CSVs (or the original source data) and build something. Answer the census like it matters, because it does. And when public data helps you understand something, tell people where the numbers came from. Citing sources is an affirmation that facts, evidence, and data matter.