GeoGratis - Natural Resources Canada

Geogratis is a web and file transfer protocol (ftp) site that distributes geospatial data of Canada. Data is available for download, without charge. Vector mapping data is available in scales ranging from 1:50 000 to 1:30 000 000 in a variety of file formats.

The data products available for download from GeoGratis are described here. These include:

CanVec

"CanVec is a multi-source product coming mainly from the National Topographic Data Base (NTDB), the GeoBase initiative (www.geobase.ca) and the data update using Landsat 7 imagery coverage. CanVec provides topographic information in vector format and contains more than 90 topographical entities thematically organized into 11 distribution themes: Administrative Boundaries, Buildings and Structures, Energy, Hydrography, Industrial and Commercial Areas, Places of Interest, Relief and Landforms, Toponymy, Transportation, Vegetation and Water Saturated Soils."

CanImage

"CanImage is an image composed of three spectral bands originating from resampled Landsat 7 orthoimages. They are chosen by the user based on the National Topographic System (NTS) at the 1:50 000 scale. This product is distributed in GeoTIFF format."

CanMatrix

"CanMatrix raster data is produced from scanned maps of Canada at the 1:50 000 and 1:250 000 scales."

NOTE: an easy way to identify the geographic area you are interested in along with its National Topographic System (NTS) code is through Toporama, a topographic browsing tool.