You don’t always have to engage in years long access-to-information battles to obtain data for stories. Some is as close as your Internet connection, and the list is expanding every year. Note: The posting dates have no meaning, and are used only to produce the alphabetical listing, which is updated as required.

As we head into forest fire season, here is some great data from the Alberta forest fire service. 
The service provides raw downloadable data on forest fires from 1961 onward.

This searchable web page allows you to find preliminary reports of accidents and incidents as reported to Transport Canada.

Transport Canada. Canadian Civil Aircraft Register.
Information on all civil aircraft registered in Canada, including ownership, aircraft type, date imported into Canada. Downloadable ZIP file contains two relational tables and a record layout.

The Public Health Agency of Canada provides a limited range of data on cancer incidence in Canada, by province, age group and type of cancer. It’s a bit clunky because you have to access and download each piece of data separately, but you can build fairly comprehensive tables to look at cancer incidence across the [...]

Summary statistics from Canadian Motor Vehicle Traffic Collisions 2006.

Search about 80,000 charities registered with the Canada Revenue Agency. In many cases, you can also download the charity’s annual information return. Returns are available for several years back and allow you to compare how much a charity raises with how much it spends to raise the money.  Indispensible whenever you are investigating a single charity, [...]

Environment Canada.  Historical climate information. You can download one of two CD image files containing daily temperature, precipitation, and snow-on-the-ground data for almost 8,000 locations across Canada up to 2000. Download the files, then burn to a CD. Resulting file includes software to access the data.

Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada.  Canadian Disaster Database.   The Canadian Disaster Database (CDD), produced by the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness (OCIPEP), contains detailed disaster information on over 700 natural, technological and conflict events (excluding war) which directly affected Canadians over the past century.

Health Canada. Drug Products Database. This database is managed by Health Canada and includes human pharmaceutical and biological drugs, veterinary drugs and disinfectant products. It contains approximately 24,000 products which companies have notified Health Canada as being marketed.

Elections Alberta provides both annual reports for parties and candidates, and a search utility to look up individual contributors.

Elections B.C.  Searchable database of contributions to parties, candidates, leadership candidates and constituency associations in British Columbia. Along with the searchable database, scanned images of paper filings are also made available for download.

Elections Canada. Searchable and downloadable databases of election contributions to federal political parties and candidates in federal elections. You first use the searchable database, then download the results as a text file. Handy for seeing who paid for the last election. A somewhat clunky interface, but the information can be extracted.

Elections Manitoba posts annual financial returns, including contributions. The reports are pdf image files, which means either optical character recognition (OCR) software or manual entry is needed to create electronic versions of these files. Home addresses are supressed, but available for viewing at Elections Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Nova Scotia releases an annual list of political contributions in PDF format. Contributions to parties, associations and candidates are contained in the same file.

Elections Ontario. Financial returns, including contributions, by parties, riding associations and candidates. Real time (within 10 business days) disclosure of central party and leadership donations. Search utility allows you to download a tab-delimited file for each party and time period. Also, annual returns and contributions for riding associations, candidates, including election-campaign reports, all in individual [...]

Quebec Chief Electoral Officer. Downloadable lists of election contributions to political parties in semi-colon delimited text files. Comprehensive PDF files also available.

Contribution information from the 2006 municipal election. You can download lists of contributions for the mayoral and councillor races, download pdf files of detailed financial documents and view a list of candidates who failed to file financial information and so cannot run in the 2010 municipal election.

One of Canada’s first CAR series looked at the federal-provincial infrastructure series of the early to mid 1990s. This is an excerpt from the dataset of infastructure projects,

This site maintained by Service Alberta provides monthly pdf format reports starting in January 2007 detailing the use of government aircraft by cabinet ministers and other officials.

Canada Foundation for Innovation. Download spreadsheet files containing all of the grants awarded by this arms-length federal organization. The money goes to universities and other institutions to fund scientific and technical research.

Downloadable Excel tables provide estimated emissions of greenhouse gases by polluting facility. No matter where you live or work in Canada, you can use this data to look at who the biggest polluters are in your area.

This Ministry of the Environment site provides downloads of Excel, Access and ESRI Shapefile datasets on the generation, transport and disposal of hazardous wastes.

Health Canada.  Adverse drug reaction database.  CBC spent years fighting for this data. Now, you can search it online, or download text files for import into your favourite database application. The data are reports of suspected adverse reactions to prescription drugs.

The City of Kamloops B.C. offers a variety of downloadable map files in ESRI Shapefile, MapInfo tab and other formats. You use an online query interface to choose the map you want. You then download it in a zipped archive.

The GeoNOVA portal allows users to download a variety of electronic maps in ESRI Shapefile, MapInfo and other formats.

Map vendors used to charge thousands of dollars for road network files for use in GIS software. There are now several free sources for the same data and cities such as Halifax and Hamilton will provide their own road network files to media and academic users at no cost other than the cost of burning [...]

Health Canada.  Notice of compliance listings. A notice of compliance is issued when a new human or vetinary drug product is approved for use in Canada, or when changes are made to the approval of an existing product. Downloadable files go back to 1991 and are updated weekly. Fields include date of NOC and reason for [...]

Environment Canada. National Pollutant Release Inventory. By law, businesses and industry in Canada must report to the NPRI the storage, use and release into the environment of more than 200 toxic substances. This is a relational database which can be downloaded and imported into Access and other database programs. Several years of data are available. [...]

Reporters looking for the Canadian context for events such as the devastating Sichuan earthquake can turn to the Natural Resources Canada earthquake database for basic details on every known earthquake in Canada since the 1600s. You can contact NRCCan to obtain the entire dataset, but data going back to 1985 is now available for download at [...]

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment now posts the raw data from its air pollution monitoring program. These readings are the basis for the air quality index, used to guage how dirty the air is as measured at stations across the province.

Every spring, the Ontario government releases the names and salaries of employees of public sector bodies earning $100,000 a year or more. The html tables can easily be copied into Microsoft Excel, or saved and imported into other spreadsheets such as Open Office and Neo Office, for sorting and filtering. The data goes back to 1996 [...]

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment maintains this website with downloads of a variety of water quality monitoring data, for both drinking water and surface water. Depending on the dataset, the data is availabe in Excel, Access, text or ESRI Shapefile formats. With the Walkerton scandal still fresh in so many people’s minds, this is a [...]

As a result of the sponsorship scandal and similar embarrassments, federal departments and agencies now publish, on their websites, details of travel and hospitality expenses of senior officials,

Trade Data Online is an industry Canada site that allows users to create custom reports on trade between Canada and the U.S. and more than 200 countries. The interface allows you to build tables and download them in delimited text format. You can choose to limit the data to a single product and country, or [...]

This handout from the IRE/NICAR CAR conference in Houston talks about how you can obtain aviation and other transportation data in Canada, despite the penchant of regulators here to keep data out of public hands.