Open data portals from the following municipal, provincial and federal governments where raw data on a variety of subjects is made available for free:
Township of Langley: https://data.tol.ca/
City of Vancouver: data.vancouver.ca
City of Surrey: data.surrey.ca
B.C. government: data.gov.bc.ca
Federal government: open.canada.ca
They can be browsed by subject or searched by keyword. Most datasets come with a description of what the data contains and how often it’s updated. When you find a dataset you’re interested in, be sure to make note of the specific URL where it’s located so you can find it again if you need to.
For agencies without open data portals, you can use Google advanced search to look for spreadsheets on a specific site (ie. site:dnv.org filetype:xlsx) or its experimental “Table Search” (research.google.com/tables) to look for data in web tables. If searching for spreadsheets, be sure to do two searches: one for filetype:xls and one for filetype:xlsx
Attribution: Chad Skelton"s Handout: SLA Presentation November 24, 2015
Free/Cheap Data Visualization Tools:
Datawrapper, Tableau Public, Google Fusion Tables
Free PDF cracking Tools:
Web Scraping Tools:
As of 2012, Statistics Canada adopted a new policy that made almost all of the data products on its website free. Four of the most useful resources for free data are:
Census Data and National Household Survey Data: tinyurl.com/dj-census
CANSIM (raw data): https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/type/data
When looking at a data table on the StatsCan site, look for the “Download” tab. From here, you can usually download simple spreadsheets as CSV or tab-delimited files. For larger datasets, download the IVT file, which you can open in StatsCan’s free “Beyond 20/20” program. From Beyond 20/20, you can then export smaller slices of the data as Excel or CSV files. Summary tables don’t have a “download” link but will often have a link to the underlying CANSIM table at the bottom.
Elections BC and Elections Canada make detailed election results available in spreadsheet format along with “shapefiles” which detail both the boundaries of ridings and the boundaries of polling areas within those ridings.
This data will allow you to analyze election results and create colour-coded election maps.
Elections BC also makes its campaign contribution data available for download as a single file.