About Canadian Internal Trade Data and Information Hub

The Canadian Internal Trade Data and Information Hub (CITH) has been developed in partnership between Statistics Canada and the Privy Council Office. It is a key pillar of the Federal Action Plan to Strengthen Internal Trade Opens in a new window which calls for more open, transparent, and accessible pan-Canadian data on the state of internal trade in Canada. The Hub brings together internal trade-related data from across federal and provincial / territorial governments, along with other sources of information including, businesses, thinktanks, and academics, that provide additional insights into economic activity across Canada.

Access by Data Users

The Hub is designed to ensure that a wide variety of users can access the data that they require according to their needs.

The core of the Hub is a Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) platform containing data from a variety of sources. The platform allows users to build data products by selecting relevant data from different databases. Data sets appearing on the platform have already been standardized and their metadata have been organized to allow for efficient data linkage. The Hub has been designed to allow for new data sets to be added to it as they become available, and Statistics Canada ensures that the most up-to-date data are on the platform. Moreover, the standardized nature of the SDMX platform will allow policy analysts, researchers, and businesses to use their choice of a broad range of data visualization programs and programming languages they wish to complete their analysis.

The interactive data visualization tools also provide access to the data without requiring specialized data analytics knowledge. These visualizations are organized by topic and provide a starting point for analysis. Users can select from a variety of pre-structured menus to create customized outputs that are relevant to them.

Phased Approach

The launch of the Hub signals an important milestone. The Hub will initially only include Statistics Canada data sets and public research and analysis. Statistics Canada, along with the Privy Council Office, will continue to work with provinces and territories, and other stakeholders to improve the functionality of the Hub and seek to include other data sets and fill data gaps that exist.