LibGuides: Geospatial Data: Census

Statistics Canada - Census Geography

Census Geopgraphy
Census geography covers a wide range of geographic areas—from provinces and territories down to blocks. These geographic areas have boundaries, names, and other information that make it possible to locate them on the ground and relate census data to them. For some products, information is available for current and previous censuses.
Boundary Files
There are two types of boundary files: cartographic and digital. Cartographic boundary files portray the geographic areas using only the major land mass of Canada and its coastal islands. Digital boundary files portray the full extent of the geographic areas, including the coastal water area. The boundary files use the Lambert conformal conic projection. Boundary files using geographic projection (latitude and longitude coordinates) are available upon request.
Road Network Files
Road network files are digital representations of Canada's national road network, containing information such as street names, types, directions and address ranges.

User applications of these files may include mapping, geocoding, geographic searching, area delineation and database maintenance as a source for street names and locations. Since statistical activities do not require absolute positional accuracy, relative positional accuracy takes precedence in the road network files. As a result, these files are not suitable for engineering applications, emergency dispatching services, surveying or legal applications.

Beyond 20/20

The Beyond 20/20 Browser is a free Windows-based program used to view Beyond 20/20 tables and extracts. Beyond 20/20 is a data browser used at Statistics Canada to organize, manage and disseminate socioeconomic data.

Beyond 20/20's pivoting and nesting capabilities make it easy to switch dimensions and show more than one dimension along rows and columns. In addition, Beyond 20/20's dynamic data format enables you to quickly and easily integrate and manipulate information from your own data sources. It allows users to display data from different perspectives, perform calculations on data, create simple charts, and save data in formats for use in other programs (along with other operations).

Most notably, Beyond 20/20 allows you to save extracted data in dbase format (.dbf), which is the best option for use with ArcGIS, see Using Geospatial Software section below. For more information on using Beyond 20/20, see Richard Boily and Siobhan Hanratty's Beyond 20/20 presentation from the DLI Bootcamp 2011.

Beyond 20/20 Browser QuickStart Guide