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.

A volunteer effort to map all the food stores in Brooklyn, New York, is an example of two rising trends: citizen mapping and increasing scrutiny of urban Americans’ access to healthy food. Would be great to work on similar projects here in Canada. Read the full article here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mapping-the-food-desert

The online map can be found at http://foodcensus.org/

via my colleague Tracey over at datalibre.ca

Happy Valentine’s day all!

Why not send you MP or MPP or City Councilor A Valentine Card!  Be sure to attach a little note in your email along with the card.  You can find your MP here http://citizenfactory.com

Sebastien Pierre at ffunction created these (http://ffctn.com/)

Hey, all you Canadian data geeks, Statistics Canada revised its Labour Force Survey (LFS) to base it on the 2006 Census population counts. As a result, to facilitate access to the revised estimates, LFS data on CANSIM will be free of charge from January 28 to February 11. For more information, head over to

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/110128/dq110128b-eng.htm

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