ajah / represent-canada-data

Digital electoral boundary files for Canada, its provinces and municipalities

Represent API: Data

Represent is the open database of Canadian elected officials and electoral districts. It provides a REST API to boundary, representative, and postcode resources.

This repository stores the digital boundary files for the database. The represent-canada repository is what's running at represent.opennorth.ca.

License

Open North has permission to redistribute all datasets in this repository. Please read the overall license and the LICENSE.txt file in each directory to know your rights. In some cases, you will not have permission to redistribute the dataset.

Data Quality

Lineage

All datasets are from government sources, with one exception: the postal code dataset in the postcodes/fed directory is from Geocoder.ca. (Canada Post has sued Geocoder.ca for distributing this file.) The definition.py files will have more details on sources and any modifications made to the files.

Completeness

We do not have permission to redistribute every dataset available through the Represent API. Specifically, we do not have permission from the Government of Ontario to distribute its boundary file and postal code concordance file. You must download these files separately from Elections Ontario. You may then use the definition.py file we provide to load it into the database.

Contributing

We need the ward boundaries for more municipalities. Please let us know if you have a ward boundary file. To go one step further, you can write a definition.py file to describe the data, using an example definition.py file.

Contact

Please use GitHub Issues for bug reports. You may also contact [email protected].

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Kent Mewhort at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), whose legal research (PDF) made it possible for this repository to be made public.