Subject Guides: Data and Statistics: Home

Quick links

Here are a few quick links to commonly-used sources of data & statistics:

Statistics Canada Main source for Canadian statistics
Data (Statistics Canada) Catalogue of data available from Statistics Canada, including data tables, data profiles, thematic maps, public use microdata files, and data visualizations.
BC stats The central statistical agency of the Province of British Columbia, includes demographic, economic, labour, and social statistics and reports based on those statistics.
DataBC Catalogue Freely available BC Government machine-readable data.
Abacus: British Columbia Research Libraries data services Collection includes data from Statistics Canada, DMTI Spatial, and other sources. **Abacus is now on a new platform; to log in, choose "University of Northern British Columbia" from the drop-down menu, and enter your UNBC username and password.
Prince George Open Data Catalogue Freely available City of Prince George machine-readable data.
Census Statistics & Data by Year Explore census data for each census year.
Historical Statistics of Canada Containing Canadian statistical tables from 1867 to mid-1970s.
<odesi> Source of Statistics Canada public-use microdata files (PUMFs), aggregate statistics tables, and various public opinion poll datasets. Also includes metadata for ICPSR and Statistics Canada master files.
CANSIM @ CHASS Canadian time-series data. UNBC login required
Open Data Portal - Government of Canada Data about Government of Canada services, financials, national demographic information, high resolution maps, etc.
ICPSR Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research - archives of mostly US social science survey microdata
IFS International Financial Statistics
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) books, papers, and statistics, including health data.
United States Data/Statistics Gateway to US government agencies providing statistics
UN data Gateway to data generated and/or distributed by United Nations statistical agencies
World Bank Free and open access data about development in countries around the world

Welcome

Welcome to the Geoffrey R. Weller guide to finding data and statistics, with a focus on Canadian information.

Quick search: Use the following search box to quickly search for data and statistics across Canadian and American sources using the <odesi> search. This collection includes Statistics Canada, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and popular opinion polls

Data or Statistics - which do you need?

This guide covers finding data and statistics from surveys and censuses, focused on the population of Canada.

Are you looking to find out characteristics of a population or group - maybe the median income in your neighborhood, or the prevalence of a specific disease? You'll want to check out the Statistics section.

Looking for data you can analyze yourself, using software like Excel of SPSS? The Data section is where you want to look.

In these data sets, each individual respondent will be represented by a row, and each column will represent the answer to a question asked on the survey. For example:

Respondent_ID	eye_colour	hair_colour
1	blue	blonde
2	brown	brown
3	green	brown

Each row above represents a person, and each column represents a variable, or answer to a question. Of course, the data sets available here are much bigger, with thousands of rows and hundreds of columns.

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Subjects: Research Data Management