The mandate of Statistics Canada is simply, "to compile and disseminate". Essentially that means that Statistics Canada compiles an inordinate amount of data about Canadians and their activities. These range from the obvious such as population, births and deaths to balance of payments and trade balances on the national level to criminal statistics. As a federal agency along with the mandate there is an unwritten policy of cost recovery. Essentially this means that the government is not looking to profit from its statistics that it sells but merely tries to recover the costs it took to compile and disseminate them. That does not mean that Statistics Canada sells every statistic that it compiles nor that it sells them all just a cost recovery prices to break even. In fact Statistics Canada operates at a loss as a service to the public. Generally, high public interest data can be viewed for free online and for a very small marginal fee in print form. It is only data that has high value added content that is often charged.
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All sorts of individuals and firms request Statistics Canada data for use in a variety of ways. These individuals have been broken down into three categories. The first we call publishers, which are firms such as Prentice Hall, Harcourt Brace, Oxford Press etc. who wish to reproduce excerpts of Statistics Canada data for reprint in textbooks and other media for sale and profit. The second category would be educational institutions such as universities. Universities will often request to add a publication to their library or professors under the auspicious of the university will ask to include excerpts of Statistics Canada data in courses. Lastly we have non-profit organizations and individuals. These could include anything from a battered women's shelter to a Ph.D candidate writing his thesis. .
Finally along with all this there is the issue of electronic publications, which today is where the real money is made.