One of the principal benefits of Profiling Canada will be professional development offered to teachers. The focus of the professional development will be statistics and data analysis. Five regional education representatives will assist teachers in the selection and analysis of data appropriate to their needs. Researchers, students and the public can obtain a wealth of statistical information for close to 6,000 Canadian cities, towns, villages, and Aboriginal communities free of charge. A simple mapping feature allows users to pinpoint the community in which they are interested.
Data are also available for census metropolitan areas and the smaller census agglomerations.
This resource is particularly useful for Canadian Communities Atlas Projects sponsored by Natural Resources Canada. The Historical Statistics of Canada is accessible on the Statistics Canada web site as a free downloadable document. The second edition of this unique reference volume was produced jointly by the Social Science Federation of Canada and Statistics Canada in 1983. The volume contains about 1,088 statistical tables on the social, economic and institutional conditions of Canada from the start of the Confederation in 1867 to the mid-1970s. The tables are arranged in sections with an introduction explaining the content of each section, the principal sources of data for each table, and explanatory notes regarding the statistics.