From a message posted to the Data Liberation Initiative mailing list:

As of April 24, 2006, all electronic publications available on the Statistics Canada website will become free of charge. … The adoption of the New Publishing Model supports the longstanding principles underlying the Agency’s dissemination program: to make information of broad public interest widely available to the Canadian public but to charge individual clients for special products and services where the benefits do not accrue to the public at large and where additional costs are incurred by the Agency in providing them. … The move to free electronic publications will increase consistency in our priced publication program and improve access to our published information for users, respondents and stakeholders.

This is a significant step towards opening up access to Canadian government information. We’re still stuck with Crown copyright (unlike in the US, where government documents are in the public domain), but it looks like the federal government is starting to move in the right direction.