About OpenStats Canada

OpenStats Canada is the homepage for Canadian cities and their rankings. The data desk builds OpenStats rankings from public data on building permits, property tax, broadband, indoor radon, natural hazards, and drinking water, then puts those rankings next to each hometown's published placement history.

Data desk

News stories, Construction Pulse, and owned rankings are produced by the OpenStats data desk — editors who work from Statistics Canada tables, Health Canada survey geographies, municipal water reports, and other named public sources. Bylines on news read “OpenStats data desk.” We do not publish unsourced community averages as if they were household measurements, and we label data tiers (direct, regional, seed) so readers can judge confidence.

Corrections and source challenges go to [email protected]. We aim to respond within five business days and to update the page or ranking note when a challenge checks out.

What you can look up

Search a city for its ranking chart, OpenStats City Score where coverage allows, and a short hometown story. Topic sites on their own subdomains publish the underlying readings for the same place. Guides and rankings on this site explain how to read those metrics.

• Canada Permits (building permits)
• Canada Property Tax (property tax)
• Canada Internet (internet providers)
• Canada Radon (radon levels)
• Canada Hazards (natural hazards)
• Canada Water Quality (drinking water quality and supply)

Editorial standards

We prefer direct-tier municipal records when the source publishes them. Where only regional or metro survey data exists, pages are labeled with the appropriate data tier so readers can judge confidence. For health and money topics such as radon and drinking water, seed or fallback rows stay labeled until a live source covers that municipality directly.

Numbers are reproduced from official sources. Page text explains what those numbers mean in plain language. For decisions about your property, tax bill, or health, use direct testing, the responsible municipality, a licensed professional, or Health Canada guidance. Full rules are on editorial standards.

How rankings are built

Ingest pipelines pull published open data on a schedule, normalize municipality identifiers, compute owned OpenStats rankings, and regenerate static pages. Refresh cadence and known limitations are documented on our methodology page. Named datasets and licence links live on data sources. Topic primers are collected under guides, owned comparisons under rankings, monthly Construction Pulse editions under reports, and timely data-desk stories under news. Common questions are answered on the FAQ.

Who runs OpenStats

OpenStats ranks Canadian cities and towns using official federal and provincial datasets. Every hometown page cites its sources and shows how the place compares.

Advertising (including Google AdSense and Amazon.ca Associates) helps fund the desk. Ads are separated from rankings and do not change which municipalities are covered or how a figure is tiered. See the advertising disclosure and privacy policy.