It has historically been kind of a pain to get our South Of The Border hands on Canadian census data online. Students kept getting thwarted by the “yes you can have access if you just pay us” messages, and if we didn’t happen to have the right standing order to the right compendium, there was a good chance we’d have to stop there.
A couple of months ago, though, there appeared a small but significant change to the E-STAT interface (which is an online tool that grants access to the Census of Population and to other socioeconomic data collected by Statistics Canada). What is this change? Well, the main page now features a blessedly short click-license that basically says that if you’re a student or on the staff or faculty at an educational institution, you can access the site and it’s content for the purposes of research and study. Alleluia.
Over the past few censuses, an increasing amount of Canadian Census information has been made available online and is readily available to the general public outside of E-STAT. At the Statistics Canada website, http://www.statcan.gc.ca, see the links on the sidebar to Community Profiles, Census and Maps and Geography. For non-census content, see the ‘By subject’ link.
M. Smith