All of StatCan's Online Data to Be Free

Never again will you have to pay for a chart comparing say, how many people were murdered with fully automatic riles vs. shotguns.

Hey all you statistics nerds! Statistics Canada will be making all of its online data free for everybody to use starting next year once 2011 census data is made available. This means everything taken from a census, as well as all economic, geographic, and social data will be yours to manipulate and torque until your opinions are supported by cold hard facts for free. This will undoubtedly be a boon for freelance journalists, economists, marketers, and more, and ought to help international researchers compare Canadian data to other countries. Statistics Canada had charged for the data to recover some of the costs in distributing hard copies, but thanks to this magical Internet thing, those costs have basically disappeared. Embassy magazine suggests that this policy change could be due to former industry minister Tony Clement's love of accessible data, so to the honourable Mr. Clement, we extend our thanks. It almost makes up for axing the long-form census last year.