Monday to Friday, at about 8:30 EST, I get an email from Statistics Canada. Every day, they release new data that I can map, every day I take a look at the email to see what I can make, however specific or not. And that’s where I stop. I tend to mark it if I want to map it later, but I haven’t yet.
Why not, you may ask?
Whenever I sit down with the intent to make a map, I realize that I never have the base data that I need. There is a variety of base data that I could need with Statistics Canada data. I could simply need Canada and her provinces, or the entire country broken down by postal code, or the entire world, as we trade with different countries.
Where can I look for this?
I’d like to be able to find this data somewhere, with a license that will allow me to display it easily online or otherwise with no issues. What are my options?
Canadian postal code data is not free. It has to be bought from Canada Post. On the other hand, national and provincial political boundaries are easy – http://www.naturalearthdata.com has global data, and GeoBase, Stats Can and GeoGratis have Canadian political boundaries.
Tried downloading the sample data, make it into shapefiles and upload them onto ESRI’s Basemap online? Or import the data into Google Fusion Tables? But if you need base data, I’ll second that Geogratis website. Natural Resources Canada also has some basic topography data.