I have a student looking for GDP by CMAs going back to 1991. The Conference Board of Canada's e-Data has this available for a fee. My questions are: has anyone obtained a membership/account for the e-Data? Second - is this data available anywhere else that I may have missed? CANSIM has Canada and Provincial level data.
Answer
We subscribe to the e-Data from CBC as well and get asked this a lot. The documentation is lacking from them. According to an economist at UofT there is potentially manual calculation work-around if a researcher is inclined I believe:
"If they are really only using the CMA employment data to do this, and we
already get it, then really the only thing that your money will be doing
is getting stats that could be computed from what we have. What they are
basically doing is the following: take gdp at the provincial level in each industry (mining, manufacturing etc...probably at the finest level of detail they have that matches the
employment breakdown). Then multiply the GDP in the industry by the fraction of employment in this industry and in the province that is employed in the region (say Toronto or the CMA region). Next they sum up across all of the GDP CMA industry values to get a total...that simple…"
