General Databases:

The best:

*Canadian Inventory of Digital Initiatives     Excellent list of databases. Good place to start your search. You can search by province,  by subject or by organization .

*Pac Info - Canada         Long list of free databases

*CAJ's CAR Caucus Page         Tips and good web sites


The rest:

*Statistics Canada

*StatsCan Census Info    From 1996, latest available.

* Canadian Statistics on-line     Descriptive links divided in two groups (social statistics & economic/environmental statistics) identify what Canadian statistics are available and accessible on-line. Currently only federal government department websites are indexed but the site will grow to included non-government statistics sources. Produced by GDSourcing

* Canadian Transportation Safety Board          Investigation reports ... but no search engine 

Legal Databases:

[See also my Legal News page]

*Canadian Laws Writing a crime story and you want to check exactly what section of the Criminal Code your subject violated and what the setence could be? This truly excellent database provided by the federal justice department (free) allows you to search the Criminal Code and other statutes.
* Virtual Canadian Law Library An excellent index of everything available online
* Search Canadian Charter Decisions

* Canadian Legal LEXPERT Directory    Provides both an extensive directory of Canadian law firms, as well as a separate directory of which firms and practitioners are recommended or regarded as leaders in a particular practice.

Business Databases:

*Strategis An excellent free service on Canadian businesses run by Industry Canada -- Canada's largest business Web site, providing easy, direct access to Industry Canada's extensive database including 60,000 reports, 500,000 pages of searchable text and hot links to Canadian and international business information databases.
*Micromedia's CREDO Canadian Research and Electronic Documents Ordering Service promises wide scale search including corporate filings, government documents. Not free.
* Financial Post's Top 50 Canadian companies
*Canadian Business Web Pages Over 1.1 million Canadian businesses listed, with a searchable database by industry category or keyword
* Hoovers Company Research Search for information on Canadian and U.S. companies

Electoral Databases:

*Ontario campaign contribution    Ontario journalist Patrick Cain has compiled information into spreadsheets which he is making available for dowload and use by other journalists.

*Federal political contributions      Easy to use for facts and figures

Environmental Databases:

* Pollution Data Branch    Databases on Canada's environment.  En Francais aussi
* National Pollutant Release Inventory       Comprehensive databases  detailing the release of pollutants into the air, water and ground by companies in Canada. The databases are available online for download and use in a database manager.

Social Databases:

* Ethnologue Database     Data on the various languages -- mostly native -- in Canada, including Dialect names, genetic affiliation, geographical region, status etc. for languages ranging from Tagish (five people out of 100 still speak it) to Wyandot (0 out of 2500).

Commercial Databases:

* Lexis-Nexis    Over 1.3 BILLION documents online, over 7,000 databases
and 13,800 news and business sources, Lexis-Nexis is the king of databases with plenty of Canadian content.  It is not free, but it can be well worth the money.

*Electric Library Canada   Vast array of magazine, news articles, maps and pictures. The TV and radio transcripts are only American though