Why is there a charge for the provision of customized datasets and various resources?
A. The reason that charges are made for specialized services is that Environment Canada, like all government departments, has limited resources. Taxes pay for the collection of weather data that is used for the general good of all Canadians and is incorporated into a variety of products including public forecasts and weather warnings. We do make as much of our data as possible available for download through our website at no charge. Of course, due to bandwidth limitations, we have to limit the amount of data that can be selected at any one time in order to not overload our servers. What are not covered by taxes are specialized extractions or reformatted data to meet the specific requirements of a client. In these cases we must charge for the time taken to do the work, the data itself is free.
