The primary mandate of the study is to provide a thorough account of the election, to underline the main reasons why people vote the way they do, to indicate what does and does not change during the campaign and from one election to another, and to highlight similarities and differences between voting and elections in Canada and in other democratic countries. The second mandate is to contribute to the development of scientific knowledge regarding the motivations of voters and the meanings of elections and election campaigns in democratic societies. The third mandate is to assemble a rich set of data about Canadians' attitudes and opinions on a wide variety of social, economic, and political issues, and to make that data publicly available to researchers in political science, sociology, economics, communications, and journalism.

CORA contains over 25 years worth public opinion poll data, and "thousands of discrete items" collected by major Canadian polling firms. CORA staff continually add new surveys to the archive's holdings, and solicit "new data from commercial research firms, independent think tanks, research institutes, NGO's, and academic researchers".

The Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) is an excellent example of a cost effective method for improving data resources for Canadian post secondary institutions. With this program, participating institutions pay an annual subscription fee that allows their faculty and students unlimited access to numerous Statistics Canada public use microdata files, databases and geographic files. Use of these files is limited to academic research and teaching purposes.

The gwd covers statistical data (health care, migration, precarious employment, technology, unions, unpaid work). The gwd "is informed by a feminist political economy approach, which conceives of gender as a set of social relations rather than an attribute of individuals." The stated thrust aside, the contents of the gwd are also of interest to the social sciences in general.

ISR annually conducts between twenty and thirty research projects at the local, provincial and national levels in such areas as education, housing, gender issues, energy and the environment, health and medical services, politics, law, social interaction and other social issues.

Established in 1962, ICPSR (the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) is the world's largest archive of digital social science data. ICPSR acquires, preserves, and distributes original research data and provides training in its analysis. It also offers access to publications based on its data holdings. There are several Canadian data files included in the ICPSR collection

LISPOP, part of Wilfrid Laurier University, is an institution dedicated to researching issues related to the "creation, use and representation of public opinion in the policy process." The institution also monitors public opinion pollsters and other interests groups practices and claims. The site offers free access to a number of aggregate data resources such seat projections and Federal party support graphs. The former provide estimations of the Canadian House of Commons is composed based on Canadian polls, and the latter display trends in voters' intentions while at the same time highlighting "the relationship between results of different polling organizations."

Members of the Metropolis project in Canada conduct research related to immigrant integration and diversity in major Canadian cities. The purpose of data collection and research is to advance research on cultural diversity and to help inform public policy on a wide array of socio-economic issues related to immigrants, ethnic, and religious minorities in the countries urban centres.

ODESI (Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure Initiative), a jointly funded project between the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and OntarioBuys will provide university researchers with unprecedented access to a significant number of datasets in a web-based data extraction system which will be delivered through the highly successful Scholars Portal model. The project will target Statistics Canada datasets, datafiles from Gallup Canada and other polling companies, public-domain files such as the Canadian National Election Surveys and selected files from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The files will be marked-up using DDI, an international, XML-based metadata tagging system which allows data resource discovery, distributed access, extraction and analysis.

The RDC Program is a nation-wide network of secure Research Data Centres. Nineteen are located on university campuses, and another one is in Ottawa (the Federal Research Data Centre). 43 post-secondary institutions are members of the program

Statistics Canada has stores of census data (gathered every five years) and approximately 350 on going surveys "on virtually all aspects of Canadian life." Users can browse statistics under various subject categories: Aboriginal peoples; Energy; Environment; Health; Information and communications technology; Population and demography, etc. More specific categories of datasets are also available - for example under Aboriginal peoples: Aboriginal peoples (general); Aboriginal society and community; Business and finance; Education, literacy and skills; Health and well-being; Households, housing and environment; Justice issues; Languages and cultures; Population characteristics; and Work, income and spending. Other information services Statistics Canada provides are: summary tables; Census; Maps and geographical information; CANSIM - Statistics Canada's key socio-economic database; and other publications (e.g. The Daily and the Canada Year Book) containing data and analysis "in the form of survey results, research reports, technical papers, periodical magazines, census products, and research compendia. Online publications date from 1996 to the present."

This service collects computer readable research data files that can be used for secondary analysis. UTDLS accepts for deposit computer-readable research data files that may be used for secondary analysis by other researchers under some (depositor specified) conditions. UTDLS accepts for deposit primary research data files in all disciplines, provided only that the data and accompanying documentation are sufficiently complete and accurate as to allow their use for independent secondary analysis.