Access open license data

Increasingly, data creators and institutions are making their datasets findable and freely accessible online. Such "open data" available online is typically assigned an Open license, of the kind laid out by the Open Knowledge Foundation or the Creative Commons.

Finding open data

More and more, government bodies (municipalities, provinces, nations, and others) are making a range of data available via open data catalogues and portals. You can generally find these by searching for the name of your municipality, region, or province + "open data" using search engines like DuckDuckGo or Google.

You can also browse :

Open data portals across Canada (Government of Canada)
Not an exhaustive list. (If you don't see the area that you're looking for, use the search technique mentioned above.)

FRDR (Federated Research Data Repository)
A federated search linking to research datasets generated by Canadian institutions and researchers. Note: not all datasets linked here are open.

Access restricted license data

SFU Library provides access to data purchased for research and educational uses, including geospatial (GIS) data, microdata files, statistical resources, and quantitative survey research data.

Support 

We support researchers with finding and using data and statistical information across all disciplines. Services include:

• assistance with locating and accessing data files and statistical resources
• identifying appropriate variables within a dataset
• assisting with extractions of selected variables to create custom datasets for research or instructional use.