Sharing this open dataset of Canada road networks from the Canada Open data website. The wiki mentions Statistics Canada(StatCan) as one of the data sources, but the StatCAN wiki page, provides a link to an outdated portal where road data is available only until 2010.

Details

The data quality and technical specifications of this 2015 dataset is detailed in the new StatCAN page.

• Provider: Statistics Canada
• Published date: 2015-05-27
• File formats: Shapefile, GML, JSON
• Frequency: Mentioned “As Needed”
• Contact: http://open.canada.ca/en/forms/contact-us
• URL: Canada road networks files 2015
• License: http://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

The road network supplied includes road classes, road names, city etc. Through a preliminary look in QGIS I have these findings.

Coverage as seen on QGIS, road classification on the left

The road classification is represented in numbers in theclass attribute. Major highways are given under class 12 in the attribute table

Data Quality

There were few concerns on OSM wiki page of StatCan regarding geometry of the roads. But the wiki page seem to be outdated and the concerns were in regards to the older data (2010). The geometry of the roads in this data set seem to align with the OSM layer in QGIS.

Roads in Toronto overlayed on OSM layer in QGIS

The street names on the data seem to be same as on OSM as well

Coverage in Toronto without OSM background

This seems like a great dataset to evaluate the quality of data and coverage of roads in Canada. Would be great to hear from the Canadian OSM community of any previous work using this dataset that can be taken forward.