In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Earlier this week, Statistics Canada started to make freely available data from the 2011 Canadian Census. Here are the release dates for the reminder of the data.

​While this is excellent news, I invite you to read the informative DataLibre.ca article: "Upon playing with the data dissemination interface today, my concerns were re-affirmed.  The data are free but not necessarily accessible, in the sense that the methods used to disseminate and discover these is complicated, unclear and there are some favourite geographies missing – most notably Dissemination Areas (DA) [editor's note: it's there, see at bottom of the full article] while others are hidden – Census Tracts (CTs). For example, if you go to the Census Profile and you want to look up 5 cities at once you cannot! You can only look up one city at a time, which also means you can only download one geography at a time.  There are over 2000 cities in Canada and if you want to know who the top 30 are in terms of population, then its “Houston we have a problem!” sorta."