Editorial Standards

How we cite external rankings

OpenStats maintains a corpus of published Canadian city rankings. For commercial magazine and paywalled studies we publish newspaper-style facts only: place name, rank or grade, year or edition, publisher, and a link to the original study. We do not reproduce full commercial score tables or paywalled methodology text. OpenStats-owned series and clearly open government datasets may publish full ranked tables.

Hometown pages chart those placements over time and compute an OpenStats City Score. Each placement is scored from 0 to 1 inside its edition (flipping the scale when rank 1 means worst, such as highest radon). The City Score is the mean of those scores across OpenStats-owned rankings. Details live on the City Score series page and under cities and studies.

What we publish

OpenStats operates six topic sites, each covering a single subject: building permits, property tax, indoor radon, drinking water quality, broadband availability, and natural hazards. Every page traces to a named federal, provincial, or municipal dataset, listed in full on the data sources page. City-page and report text explains what those figures mean. It stays within what the source data supports.

Cross-city rankings and monthly reports, such as the rankings and the Construction Pulse series, are built from the same municipality readings published on each topic site. They use a fixed, documented method. Every city that qualifies under those rules is included. Timely data-desk notes on ranking shifts and atlas coverage appear under news; those stories cite the same sources and do not replace city or atlas tool pages.

Data tiers

Not every source reports every municipality at the same level of precision. Every OpenStats page states which tier applies to the figures on it:

• Direct. Reported specifically for that municipality in the source, or matched to it with high geographic confidence.
• Regional proxy. The municipality is not separately broken out in the source, so the page uses the nearest broader geography, typically a census metropolitan area, as the best available estimate.
• Seed / fallback. Used only where no live source currently covers a municipality. Seed rows are excluded from monetization gating on health, financial, and legal (YMYL) topics until a live source covers that municipality directly.

Rankings and reports that aggregate across cities, including the Construction Pulse series, count only direct-tier, live readings toward national totals and city comparisons. A full explanation of how data moves from source to page lives on the methodology page.

Corrections

Every figure on OpenStats is drawn from a published public dataset. If a figure looks wrong, the most common cause is an error at the source, a geography mismatch during normalization, or a source table that has since been revised. To report a correction, email [email protected] with the page URL, the specific field you believe is incorrect, the value you expect, and a link or citation to the official source document that supports it. We aim to acknowledge correction reports within five business days. Verified corrections are applied at the next scheduled ingest run for the affected topic; we do not restore a page to how it appeared before a correction was applied.

Where a dataset is later found to contain a systemic error affecting many municipalities at once, such as a revised geography code or a recalculated survey weight, the correction is applied across the network at the next scheduled run for that pipeline.

No medical, tax, or legal advice

Figures on health, financial, and legal topics, including radon concentration, drinking water quality, and property tax mill rates, are provided for general informational and comparative purposes only. They are not medical advice, tax advice, or legal advice, and should not be treated as a substitute for direct testing, a licensed professional, or an official determination specific to a property or situation. A community-level average, in particular, describes a geography, not any single home or property; decisions with health or financial consequences should rely on measurements or determinations specific to that property.

Advertising disclosure

OpenStats is supported by display advertising, including Google AdSense, served on most pages across the network. Advertisements are visually separated from editorial content and are not written, reviewed, or endorsed by OpenStats. Advertising placement does not influence which municipalities are covered, how a figure is tiered, or the content of any ranking or report. Details on the cookies and third-party vendors used for advertising are in the privacy policy. A short public summary lives on the advertising and affiliate disclosure page.

OpenStats participates in the Amazon.ca Associates Program and may earn from qualifying purchases when you follow product links on money pages. Other sponsored partners (for example mortgage or ISP comparison tools) are labelled where they appear. OpenStats does not accept payment in exchange for a specific data figure, ranking placement, or favorable editorial treatment of a municipality.

Independence and ownership

OpenStats ranks Canadian cities from public data, independent of the government agencies and municipalities whose figures appear here. We are not affiliated with Statistics Canada, Health Canada, Natural Resources Canada, or any provincial or municipal government named on the data sources page; those organizations publish the underlying data, and we cite them on every page that uses their figures.

Questions about this policy, or about a specific page's sourcing, can be sent to [email protected]. See also the methodology page for how data is ingested and tiered, the data sources page for the full list of named datasets, and contact for how to reach us directly.