
Canadian open data portal - bryanrasmussen
http://open.canada.ca/en/open-data
======
a3n
Like so many other kinds of national leadership, it occurs to me that the
current US administration's restriction, removal and tainting of data
(remember the panicked surge of downloads of science data after the election,
and the restrictions on what words the CDC can use, and whether "climate
change" can be uttered by Interior Department staff) is going to shift the
center of "reliable data" outside the US to places like Canada and Europe.
Heck, even China can decide to play in that space.

And so the US reduces its voice and influence in yet another area. One example
will be that citations of US data will decline; being reminded less and less
of US data, researchers and similar will tend not to look for it in the first
place.

~~~
kevin_nisbet
While I agree with you, I just wanted to point out, that Canada isn't clean
here either. While I don't really remember all the details, the previous
government had a particularly poor reputation for destroying records and
attempting to control the narrative on government funded research.

Quick reference article: [https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/4w578d/the-
harper-governm...](https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/4w578d/the-harper-
government-has-trashed-and-burned-environmental-books-and-documents)

~~~
a3n
I remember that too. While the triggering example was the Canadian site, my
concerns are more about America's loss of credibility relative to the world,
not Canada specifically.

I also understand that the science censorship issues in Canada have begun to
swing back the other way, but I'm not sure if that's because of their current
administration or if it began before that.

------
giarc
Of the 5 or 6 I clicked on, I was only able to find one with actual data. Most
seem to just be a record of the data that exists, but not a source of the
data.

For example, fire stations in Canada has 35 'thumbs up' but no actual data
available
([http://open.canada.ca/en/search/inventory/reference/tcod-201...](http://open.canada.ca/en/search/inventory/reference/tcod-2016-0721))

~~~
icegreentea2
I think the ratio is heavily influenced by the submitting department. The
thumbs ups are 'upvotes' back to the submitting body that they should
prioritize this dataset.

If you're really interested, you can pull down the csv data set and sort by
date released.

------
dgudkov
Ideally, a government should be a set of APIs that can be used not just for
retrieving data, but also for performing various actions, e.g. updating home
address, registering a company, requesting a new driver's license, etc.
Permissions for authorized 3rd parties can be assigned through digital
certificates. Outsourcing government functions to 3rd parties will create
competition and reduce state expenses.

I wonder if Canadian or any other government has a similar vision.

------
52-6F-62
Anybody interested in these data sets will probably also appreciate GeoGratis:

[http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-
sciences/geography/topographic-...](http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-
sciences/geography/topographic-information/free-data-geogratis/11042)

~~~
ylem
As part of the ongoing government wide Web Renewal efforts, please note that
as of August 31, 2017, the GeoGratis Catalogue and Search tools will no longer
be available. As of that date, you should consult the Open Government of
Canada search tool.

~~~
52-6F-62
The framework is still in use to display geographic and topographical data in
the Open Data portal.

------
open-source-ux
For an international comparison, the Global Open Data Index ranks countries
based on the open government data made available. Canada ranks well at number
5 (jointly with Finland and Norway).

[https://index.okfn.org/place/](https://index.okfn.org/place/)

~~~
vijayr
One of the most striking columns in that list is the "Government Spending"
column. It is red all over the place, including top two in the list - Taiwan
and Australia!

------
DeBraid
These data might be impacted by Canada's stance on disclosure:

> Last week the Canadian finance ministers announced that federal, provincial,
> and territorial governments will require companies to keep information on
> beneficial owners that can be made available to authorities. In the same
> week, all 28 EU members agreed to make such information publicly available
> on registries and to make beneficial owners of trusts available to
> authorities.

Source: [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/how-much-real-
estate...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/how-much-real-estate-do-
foreigners-really-own-statscan-got-it-wrong/article37439665/)

~~~
mistermann
That data will never be released to the public, even if they do intend to
actually gather it properly. The Canadian economy needs foreign money to not
fall into recession.

------
ryanweinstein
Was there a recent update or improvement here? They've had this going for a
few years now..

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Not really, I hadn't noticed it before, and came across it so I posted.

------
microcolonel

        <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
        <html><head>
        <title>400 Bad Request</title>
        </head><body>
        <h1>Bad Request</h1>
        <p>Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.<br />
        Request header field is missing ':' separator.<br />
        <pre>
        Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chro</pre>
        </p>
        </body></html>
        
    

A broken request parser? What a lovely first impression.

~~~
justusw
I can confirm that it is broken for me on Firefox Nightly and Chrome.

~~~
bdamm
Worked fine for me: Firefox Quantum 57.0.1 (Mac OS X)

~~~
mthoms
No problems here on Safari/MacOS

