(a) Microdata on Individuals and Households.
The most important, and widely used household surveys in Canada for labour research are:
(b) Microdata on Workplaces and/or Firms.
There is currently, to our knowledge, no publicly available microdata on Canadian firms. Statistics Canada is however in the process of administering a Canadian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, which should be released in the next year or so.
(c) Aggregate data.
The most widely-used and accessible aggregate data on Canadian labour and other markets is available through CANSIM. There is a CANSIM site from which data can be downloaded by eligible researchers at: http://cansim.epas.utoronto.ca:5680/.
(a) Original Canadian Microdata
All the surveys described above are produced by Statistics Canada, who provide public use microdata files. At the moment, these files, plus many other StatCan data sets, are freely accessible to any researcher affiliated with a Canadian university, so long as that university participates in Statistics Canada's DATA LIBERATION INITIATIVE (DLI).
(b) Other Data Extracts and microdata files available from CILN
The following are available to Canadian researchers in DLI institutions:
(i) it is a survey of annual expenditures and does not suffer so badly from infrequency as do diary (two week survey) based surveys;
(ii) the income data is thought to be of high quality since the survey is carried out around tax preparation time;
(iii) questions are asked about changes in assets over the year so that two different measures of saving are available;
(iv) there is geographical variation in various things such as prices, social assistance etc..
Labour Market and Income Data Guide Statscan's overview of Individual and Household Data, Labour Market Surveys and Income Surveys.