Talk:Canada admin level

Statistics Canada Subdivisions should not be tagged as administrative boundaries

Why does OSM include the boundaries of Statistics Canada subdivisions in Yukon? Many of the Statistics Canada subdivision boundaries are just crude lines drawn by Statisticians; and many of these boundaries were never intended to align with administrative or jurisdictional boundaries. Unfortunately, OSM contains multiple Statistics Canada Subdivision boundaries that have been tagged as "boundary=administrative". The boundaries, when rendered on the OSM map, have a look and feel of jurisdictional boundaries; they give an illusion that jurisdictions exist where they do not. Examples:

1. Carcross. This is tagged as an Administrative Level 6 boundary. Level 6 supposedly means "incorporated municipality" when used in Yukon. The shape is a rectangle that appears to be be a merge of the Carcross and Carcross 4 Statistics Canada subdivisions. Thus OSM is portraying Carcross as a municipality with a rectangular boundary. In reality, the community of "Carcross" is an unincorporated settlement; this means it is not a municipality and does not have a legal or surveyed municipal boundary. Natural Resources Canada provides only a single latitude/longitude coordinate pair; it does not attempt to define a boundary [1]. Note: Carcross does have a Local Area Plan (LAP) boundary that was defined by the Yukon government in 2013; this boundary looks nothing like the Statistics Canada boundary. I am not advocating for LAP boundaries to be added to OSM, but it is something that could be debated.
2. Yukon, Unorganized. This is tagged as a level 5 administrative boundary. Both the name and the boundary line are concoctions of Statistics Canada. The boundary is only administrative in that it is used by Statistics Canada to administer its own statistical datasets; that is not normally what the word "administrative" implies when used as an adjective to describe a boundary.
3. Whitehorse, Unorganized. Ditto.
4. Old Crow. This one uses a boundary that somebody from Statistics Canada clearly drew on the back of a napkin. I won't say any more.

I honestly think that all of the Yukon Statistics Canada subdivision boundaries should be removed from OSM. Alternatively they should be clearly tagged as statistics boundaries instead of administrative boundaries such they they do not get rendered. MapGrid (talk) 00:36, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

OK so nobody commented. I started converting some of them to boundary=census. MapGrid (talk) 06:25, 19 May 2021 (UTC)