This website gives you fast, easy access to detailed records of air pollution, water quality, climate conditions and land use for hundreds of communities across Canada. All the data on this site were collected by provincial and federal government agencies. The Sources page gives you more information about where the data come from and what some of the technical terms mean.

Choose a category from the buttons at the top: Air (pollution concentrations and emissions); Water (pollution levels); Climate (temperature and precipitation); or Land (land use categories).
A menu will pop up that lets you select the data type (if applicable) then province and city. You can also choose to navigate by map.

• • Goes back to 1974 in many places.
• • Click on the thumbnail to open an interactive chart.
• • Different coloured dots represent different monitoring stations in that city. Click on a station in the legend to make it disappear from the chart. Click again to make it reappear.
• • The default format has a vertical scale based on the maximum range for that pollutant in the Canada-wide record.
• • The horizontal dashed line represents the tightest current air quality standard (Maximum Desirable Level). If there are two lines the upper one represents the Maximum Acceptable Level and the lower one represents the Maximum Desirable Level. See the Sources page for more details.
• • You can click and drag on a section to zoom in on that interval.
• • The mini-menu button lets you download the data or the graph itself, in various formats.

• • Goes back to 1990.
• • Data is available in provincial and national totals.
• • Click on a sector in the legend to make it disappear from the chart; click again to make it reappear.

• • Includes levels of contaminants or measures of water quality in rivers across Canada
• • Navigation is by province then river.
• • Click on the thumbnail to open an interactive chart.
• • Bear in mind that some graphs show a measure of pollution and others show a measure of water quality. Please read the information on the Sources page to understand what you are looking at.
• • You can click and drag on a section to zoom in on that interval.
• • The mini-menu button lets you download the data or the chart in various formats.

• • Navigation is by province then community. Data go back to before 1900 in many places.
• • There are tabs for Monthly Average Daytime Highs and Monthly Average Precipitation.
• • If no precipitation data are available the thumbnails will be blank.
• • Click on a thumbnail to open an interactive chart.
• • The default format for temperature has a vertical scale based on the typical range in the Canada-wide record (-40 C to +40C).
• • You can click and drag on a section to zoom in on that interval.
• • The mini-menu button lets you download the data or the chart in various formats.

• • Includes the national breakdown of land use by major category and provincial forestry statistics.

The first edition of this website was developed in winter 2014 by Professor Ross McKitrick at the University of Guelph, with funding support from the Research Fellowship in Sustainable Commerce at the College of Business and Economics. The new edition was designed by Professor McKitrick in 2017 and developed by Sandbox Software Solutions. Generous funding support has been received from the Donner Canadian Foundation, Davis Engineering Ltd and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.