Andrew;
Some of Statistics Canada data are under that licence, most are not. For example, economic division, environment, health, crime and so on are not nor are population projections, death rates, birth rates and so on are not under that licence. If you wish to have cross tabs on the free data, that is at a very large cost, as that is considered a custom order, of if you want data aggregated to boundaries such as wards, neighbourhoods or health districts, that also is a very hight cost. In addition, our current government cancelled the census, as you know, the free data from the national household survey are considered unreliable and uneven and do not scale down to smaller geographies due to the methodology adapted. Statistics Canada made the census data free, real census data as they had recovered the costs from earlier sales, what they made free were these NHS which are of much less quality and ealier census data only.
What is available via the portal is a small sample of what the statistical agency holds, and in fact, for real data practioners and users, we do not go to the portal as the search functionality is terrible. The system in place does not scale well. Most people still go to the statistics canada website as you have the data with the methodological guides, the surveys and so on, the information surrounding the data. In theory a centralized portal seems nice, but the reality is, in the case of Canada anyway, there is a distance created between the data producer and the user when the data are centralized in this way, which means you loose context and access to the specialists who can answer questions. Also, the geographic search for the data are lost in this centralized portal. So it is not the best way.
Furthermore, that is only one agency, there is citizenship, hrsdc, industry, and so on who all produce statistical data as well as administrative data and their data are not in the portal as they should be nor are they available from their site. The ranking is not just for Statcan it is for statistical data in general.
I think the score should remain the same, and in fact, if we actually had access to the inventory of datasets produced by the federal government, we may consider lowering this score even more, as only a small sample of actually produced federal data are in that portal. Finally, with the decimation of Library and Archives Canada, access to historical data are now impeded.
Until which time that all data are open, I think this score has to stay.
Thank you for bringing it up howerver.