How do we select our data sources?

Our Canada Facts series relies on data from government agencies and departments such as Statistics Canada, the Bank of Canada, and the Department of Finance, as well as, federal, provincial, and municipal government open data portals. For national comparisons on topics like life expectancy, GDP, and population growth, we use data from other countries' governments and intergovernmental institutions such as the UN, World Bank, WHO, and IMF. These groups gather data directly from national sources to keep it consistent. We also use these sources for our Trendlines series. This approach helps us provide fair and trustworthy data. We lightly process the raw data to analyze it and create visuals.

What data processing do we perform?

Preparing original data for analysis and creation of visualizations involves several steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing location names, converting units, calculating indicators such as per capita measures and annual percent changes, as well as, combining information from across multiple datasets. Whenever possible, we include links to the original sources referenced in our articles and visualizations and make the processed datasets available for download as CSV or XLSX formats.

Can we reuse your work?

Our visualizations and datasets are free to use without attribution, but we’d be thrilled if you would mention us or let us know that you’ve incorporated our datasets in your projects. The datasets referenced in our Canada Facts series are licensed under Creative Commons and free to use. We’re committed to making Canada-related data more accessible. We are currently working on making the raw and processed datasets featured in our articles available for download.