What Happened to Historical Statistics of Canada?

For whatever reason, Statistics Canada has changed the nature of the access to its web version of Historical Statistics of Canada.  Until recently, the electronic version of this classic work of data (with paper editions published in 1965 and 1983) covering Canada from 1867 to the mid 1970s provided the tables of the assorted sections in HTML, PDF and CSV formats.  That has changed and not exactly for the better.

The CSV versions of the 1,088 statistical tables on the social, economic and institutional can no longer be accessed even though the description says they still are.  This removes a very useful option for data exploration for teaching and research purposes.  The current link that works for now (and you can’t always seem to get to it with a Google search so you might want to bookmark it) now only offers a choice in HTML and PDF but only the PDF seems to work and only if you click on “More info”. If you click on the section link not much seems to happen which can be annoying until you figure things out.

I am frankly not sure why this has been done and to be fair, I have not asked anyone at Statistics Canada as to why this has happened.  It is not the end of the world – the PDFs are still there – but the access is not as convenient as it used to be.

Comments

[Stephen Gordon]

Oh for Pete's sake.

I can`t even get it to load properly.

[Colin W]

A little bit of creative googling shows that the files are still on their server and available to download even if the site isn't working properly.

Sorry about the long google URL, but see here: https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectiona/+filetype:csv&filter=0

This is equivalent to googling: site:http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectiona/ filetype:csv

The results give you the links to each CSV file that they have on the server for Section A. If you change the part of the search that says "/sectiona/" to, for example, "/sectionb/" you'll get the same results for Section B.

I've only tried this for Section A and Section B, but I assume it works in general.

In some cases you will have to click the option that comes up and says "repeat the search with omitted results included" to see all of the available files.

[Gus]

Here it's what I found so far: It appears that the sections have been "archived". If you follow the links here:

http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/olc-cel/olc.action?objId=11-516-X&objType=2&lang=en&limit=0

you can find all the sections/documents; however, no access to the csv files neither the html version. But you have access to the pdf files with all the data. Not very difficult to extract.

[Statistics Canada]

We appreciate that your readers find our historical data useful, and we confirm that Statistics Canada’s historical data is available online at http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/olc-cel/olc.action?objId=11-516-X&objType=2&lang=en&limit=0 .

Some of the archived publications had been corrupted in the past, but they have since been corrected and are now functioning properly in both PDF and HTML formats. We apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused.

If you experience any further issues accessing information on the Statistics Canada website, we encourage you to contact us at 1-800-263-1136 or [email protected].

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/