The Federation of Canadian Municipalities in its work on Quality of Life Reporting in Canada’s 24 big cities has just released its 6th thematic report:

Mending Canada´s Frayed Social Safety Net: The role of municipal governments

These reports are really loaded with Municipal, Provincial and Federal administrative data on a wide variety of topics.

Collecting data from cities is incredibly difficult, it gets worse at the provincial level, and improves somewhat at the Federal level with some departments being better than others.

I hope that Open Data movements and initiatives in Canada will inspire all of our public sectors. Our 3 at times 4 levels of government will hopefully begin to coordinate their information and data resources and make them more readily available to the public.

Canadian’s need more evidence based reporting than ever, to manage the smaller finacial morsels coming back to our cities, and it is reports like these that help us inform those decisions. Clearly, we have been missing some evidence!