Statistics Canada (StatCan) is Canada's equivalent of the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics combined — the single authoritative source for census demographics, labour market statistics, health data, housing indicators, and agricultural surveys, all published against a well-defined geographic hierarchy from national level down to Dissemination Areas of 400–700 people.
Since 2012, all StatCan data has been free and openly licensed, making it one of the most accessible national statistical systems in the world for GIS integration. For anyone doing spatial analysis in Canada, StatCan provides both the statistical tables and the boundary files needed to map them.
The table-to-map workflow is straightforward: download census or survey tables with GEOUID codes, join them to StatCan's boundary Shapefiles or GeoJSON, and the data is immediately mappable in Atlas, QGIS, or ArcGIS. What makes StatCan especially useful for longitudinal analysis is that Census Tracts remain stable across census years, so you can compare demographic shifts over time at a consistent geographic unit.
StatCan also publishes road network and hydrography files, making it a one-stop source for Canadian spatial infrastructure. For cross-country work, StatCan data pairs with the U.S. Census Bureau and ACS for North American analysis, though the geographic hierarchies and classification systems differ between the two countries and require some harmonization effort.
