An honest audit of what every Ontario city actually publishes. The expansion plan is gated by data — not by code — and these cells decide whether a new city is a four-hour deployment or a three-week project.
| City | ArcGIS / hub | Parcel polygons | Addresses | Building footprints | Storm infrastructure | Zoning / land use | Stormwater bylaw | City billing data | Aerial imagery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MississaugaPop 717k · Live | Yes | 158k | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | $128.90 / 267 m² | Public tool only | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| HamiltonPop 590k · Live | Yes | Yes | 273k | Yes | Yes | Yes | $200.75 / 291 m² | Per-parcel published | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| LondonPop 425k · Live | Self-hosted | 112k | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | $172.62 / ha / mo | None | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| OakvillePop 213k · Live | Yes | 65k | Yes | 64k | Not probed | Yes | $0.13/m² · 50% credit | Fee class per-parcel | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| WindsorPop 230k · Partial | Portal only | Portal download | Portal download | Portal download | Not probed | Likely | Per-parcel credit | None | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| BurlingtonPop 187k · Blocked | 170 svcs | Not exposed | Not exposed | Not exposed | Not exposed | Not exposed | No credit program | None | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| BramptonPop 656k · Blocked | 495 svcs | Not public | Not public | Yes | Manholes only | Yes | Per-m² | None | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| Kitchener–WaterlooPop 590k combined · Partial | 291 svcs | Points only | Yes | Yes | 14 layers | Not exposed | 45% max credit | None | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| GuelphPop 144k · Partial | 152 svcs | Parcel Fabric | Not exposed | Not exposed | Not exposed | Yes | On utility bill | None | SCOOP 0.5 m |
| HalifaxPop 480k · Blocked on imagery | 360 svcs | 187k | Yes | Yes | Likely | Yes | $0.227/m² · 50% credit | None | No free NIR |
| EdmontonPop 1.0M · Blocked | Socrata | Points only | Yes | Limited | Not exposed | Yes | EPCOR SIAP credit | None | AltaLIS |
| OttawaPop 1.02M · Defer 12 mo | 432 svcs | Unclear | Yes | Yes | Yes | 17 layers | % of MPAC, no credit | N/A | SCOOP 0.5 m |
No, cities do not all publish the same data myth-busted
It was the natural assumption — Ontario municipalities run similar GIS shops on similar ESRI contracts, why would they diverge? They diverge a lot. Mississauga ships 1,300+ feature services; Hamilton publishes the city's own billing calculator data per parcel; Brampton publishes 495 services but withholds parcels entirely; Kitchener publishes parcels as points, not polygons. Each city makes independent decisions about what is "public" and the divergence is the opportunity — being the aggregator that normalizes a fragmented market.
Two distinct deployment patterns strategy
Parcel polygons are the gating ingredient root blocker
Every other layer has a workaround. Building footprints can be approximated from imagery; addresses can be reverse-geocoded; storm infrastructure is decorative. But without per-parcel polygons we can't bill the right entity. Brampton has every other ingredient and is still blocked. Provincial Land Information Ontario "Ontario Parcel" data is the candidate fallback for Brampton, Kitchener, and any future blocked city — not yet confirmed accessible.
SCOOP covers the entire province free input
Geospatial Ontario's South Central Ontario Orthography Project publishes 0.5 m, four-band RGB+NIR imagery for every city in this matrix and refreshes through 2027. Imagery is never the blocker for any Ontario deployment — only published vector data is.
The original deployment. Mississauga publishes the parcels and a public estimator tool, but does not publish per-parcel billing as open data. We compute the charge from SCOOP imagery, calibrated against the city's published estimator.
The gold-standard deployment. Hamilton publishes Stormwater_Fee_Calculator_Data with ANNUAL_FEE and BILLING_UNIT_COUNT per parcel. Built in an afternoon — no imagery estimation needed for the charge.
Bylaw WM-28 effective Jan 1 2026: $172.62 per hectare per month for lands > 0.4 ha, up to 50% credit for ICI properties with an engineer's storm drainage report. 112,351 parcel polygons + 60k addresses + 90k building outlines + zoning all ingested. 2,190 credit-eligible ICI parcels billing $14.2M/yr, $7.1M potential savings.
Stormwater Charge By-law approved Sept 2025, in effect 2026: ~$0.13/m² of total property area for non-residential, ramping to full cost-recovery by 2029. Up to 50% credit. The Town publishes Stormwater_Fee_Billing_Parcels with SWMFeeClass pre-populated for all 65,178 parcels. 2,710 credit-eligible non-residential parcels (NonResCI/IM/SP) billing $5.2M/yr at the 2026 rate, $2.6M potential savings. 70 parcels over $10K.
Windsor adopted a per-parcel stormwater credit framework (residential + ICI eligible) — the credit program is real and active. Property + assessment data sits at opendata.citywindsor.ca/Details/204 but is delivered as a downloadable shapefile from the portal, not a clean ArcGIS REST feature service. Workable but requires manual refresh cycles rather than the live re-sync we use in Hamilton/Oakville/London.
170-service ArcGIS catalog, but no parcels, addresses, or building footprints are publicly exposed. Most material: Burlington does not run a stormwater credit program — there is nothing for a lead-gen map to point at even if the data were available.
495 services in the catalog, including Building_Footprints, Roads, Land_Use_Development, and the Official Plan — but no parcel polygons and no address points are exposed. Brampton's stormwater charge does exist and is impervious-based, but we cannot bill without parcel identity.
Joint Kitchener + Waterloo + Cambridge + Region of Waterloo program with 45% max credit. Kitchener publishes Property_Ownership_Public — but with POINT geometry only, not polygons. Building outlines and storm infrastructure are full polygons.
Has a Parcel Fabric layer and zoning polygons. Addresses and building footprints are not exposed on the open ArcGIS hub. Stormwater fee appears on the utility bill — impervious-based — but rate structure not yet confirmed.
Halifax Water charges $0.227 per m² of impervious area annually, up to 50% credit at 1:100-year peak-flow control. 187k parcel polygons + 172k building polygons + 158k addresses + 11k zoning polygons all available on the HRM ArcGIS hub (org 11XBiaBYA9Ep0yNJ). Full ingest pipeline built, tested, and run locally — Halifax is one step from deployable.
EPCOR's Stormwater Intensity Adjustment Program (SIAP) is an active credit program for commercial + multi-family-residential properties. Strong market (1M+ pop), lots of ICI inventory. But parcel polygons are published as point geometry only on Socrata (data.edmonton.ca) — same blocker as Kitchener-Waterloo.
Stormwater fee is currently calculated as a percentage of MPAC-assessed property value — no impervious-based pricing and no credit program. 432 services on ArcGIS, full zoning + addresses available, but without a credit to recover there's nothing for PARCELFLOW to lead-gen against.
Find a free multi-band imagery source for Nova Scotia (NRCan NIR or licensed GeoNOVA). Halifax ships the same week it lands.