The Munk Schook of Global Affairs is organizing a panel discussion on data and policy in Canada, moderated by the Toronto Star's Carol Goar. Speakers will include Former Chief Statistician of Canada Munir Sheikh, as well as Mel Cappe, and David Hulchanski. The panel is titled Imposed Ignorance: On what evidence does Ottawa base its policies?

Event description

What are the effects of lack of accurate information on businesses, social services, planners, providers of health care services, on all of us?

Profiles at custom geographies

Census and NHS Profiles are now available at custom geographies. To download Profiles at custom geographies, select CG (for custom geography) on the product page of the Census and NHS Profiles.

You may have noticed that all standard NHS topic-based tabulations—those that are freely available on the Statistics Canada website—are now available in the communitydata.ca catalogue.

The Building Permits dataset provides the count (units) and value (dollars) of residential and non-residential construction down to the census subdivision (CSD). The 2013 data is now in the catalogue.

Check out the 2013 Building Permits data!

The first batch of Community Poverty Project tables are in! Previously known as the Urban Poverty Project, these tables are crosstabulations that focus on poverty, especially among vulnerable groups.

The 2014 Postal Code Conversion File (enhanced by Environics Analytics) is now available in the catalogue. For those not familiar with the PCCF, it allows you to map each six-digit postal code with a latitude/longitude coordinate. It also tells you which census geographies each postal code falls into. (Just be careful doing so with dissemination areas and census subdivisions: their boundaries don't coincide very well with postal codes.)

Schedule B lists data products that we intend to acquire during any given program year (April 1 to March 31). Over the past few months, we've been busy acquiring and cataloguing several new data tables. Since then, 12 data products have been added or updated to the most recent year. The 2014-2015 Schedule B is up to date as of August 26, 2014.

Also, 2012 Taxfiler tables have arrived and we are working to catalogue them in the next two weeks. If you require a specific 2012 Taxfiler table urgently, let us know.

Census and NHS Profile tables are now available at the Health Region ("HR") geographic scale for all of Canada. These same tables are also freely available from Statistics Canada, but are rather difficult to find on their site.

• Check out the 2011 Census Profile
• Check out the 2011 NHS Profile

Materials from the Annual Meeting

• Annual Report, 2013-2014
• Agenda
• Presentation slides

Data usage exceeds expectations

We will be hosting the Community Data Canada roundtable with the theme of small-area income data, on 18 June 2014. The webinar-style roundtable will take place between 1:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. ET. If you would like to share your experience with Taxfiler, NHS, or TransUnion data, let us know.

Stay tuned for more details and an agenda.