Embassy Magazine has broken the story that all of Statistics Canada’s online data will not only be made free, but released under the Government of Canada’s Open Data License Agreement that allows for commercial re-use.

The scope of this seems to cover all the Statistics Canada products we’ve wanted to use in the past, which is fantastic, but the devil is in the details. The issues of exactly what data will be free, what level of geography will they be available at and in what formats will they be disseminated are all still to be answered. Also, for those of us doing mapping work, does this include all the geography products? Nice to have free data, but if it is a pain to get at and really be useful, it becomes a bit of frustrating exercise. Waiting to see what Statistics Canada’s response will be to this.

David Eaves has a good article on providing some analysis on the Background, Winners and Next Steps on this announcement.