Where to go on the Statistics Canada site
On the main page of Statistics Canada’s site there is broad subject index that is a good starting point. A brief description of other key resources available on their site is given below.
Community profiles provide summary statistical information for every community Canada drawn from recent censuses. This link will take you to the 2006 returns, at the bottom of the left column are links to the 1996 and 2001 census returns. Unfortunately this feature is not available for earlier census returns.
http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/index.cfm?Lang=E
In the mid 1960s and then in the early 1980s academics centred at Queen’s University, working through the Social Science Federation of Canada and in collaboration with Statistics Canada, produced two volumes of historical statistics of Canada. This was the basic resource in the field prior to the explosion of online data associated with the development of the web. This link will take you to an electronic version of the second edition originally published in 1983. You can download any of the tables in a variety of formats.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/11-516-x1983001-eng.htm
Statistics Canada maintains a large inventory of current statistics, which can be examined by geographic region, province or territory, or by major cities, for a widely diverse series of topics pertaining to life in Canada, from sports, culture and recreation to economic and business information. For many of these topics you can retrieve data for the past decade, for a list by subject of the summary tables available go to:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/z01/cs0002-eng.htm
Statistics Canada publishes a wide variety of surveys and analyses on social trends. A useful collection of reports known as the Canadian Social Trends was produced from 1997 to 2012 when it was discontinued is still available on online, The following link will take you to a comprehensive chronological index of all the articles they published.
http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/bsolc/olc-cel/olc-cel?catno=11-008-X&CHROPG=1&lang=eng
Statistics Canada sells data to corporations and various levels of governments as a major source of its revenue. You can order a wide variety of tables that you design through Cansim which charges $3 a time series. To allow for academic research on Canada, Memorial and 76 other institutions of higher learning participate in the Data Liberation Initiative. Data obtained through DLI is free. For a list of topics covered by the DLI go to
Students exploring inequality in Canada 