Montreal has published municipal open data since the early 2010s, today from a CKAN catalogue at donnees.montreal.ca. A Politique de donnees ouvertes overhauled in December 2015 committed the city to 'ouverture par defaut' and to publishing an inventory of the data it holds, whatever its openness; a Charte des donnees numeriques presented in October 2020 added 13 ethical principles. Both are policy instruments rather than by-laws, and no compliance reporting on either was found. Every one of the 405 datasets in the catalogue names a licence in its metadata.
405 datasets in the catalogue on 26 July 2026, of which 403 carry Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and 2 carry Canada's Open Government Licence 2.0 — no dataset is published without a named licence.
🎓 Lesson
A licence only governs reuse where it actually reaches the dataset metadata, not just the terms-of-use page. Montreal names one on all 405 records; the ethical charter layered on top produced principles but no register, no audit and no published account of whether it is followed.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ Ville de Montreal — CKAN API, package_search with license_id facetQueried directly against the CKAN API rather than the website, 26 July 2026. Returns 'count': 405 and exactly two licence buckets: {'name': 'cc-by', 'display_name': 'Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International', 'count': 403} and {'name': 'OGL-Canada-2.0', 'display_name': 'Licence du gouvernement ouvert a Canada', 'count': 2}. 403 + 2 = 405, so there is no unlicensed remainder. Dataset records carry 'license_url': 'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/', i.e. the unmodified international deed, not a municipal one.
↗ Ville de Montreal — Licence d'utilisation des donnees ouvertesThe city adopted Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 'le 27 fevrier 2014' by 'la resolution CG14 0091 du Conseil d'agglomeration'. Conditions: users must 'crediter les donnees et les contenus que vous utilisez' and say whether they modified or drew interpretations from them, and 'Vous ne pouvez pas restreindre l'acces aux donnees et contenus originaux' — you may not restrict access to the originals the city shared.
↗ Ville de Montreal — Notre demarche (Politique de donnees ouvertes)States the open-by-default rule verbatim: 'Ouvert par defaut : toute donnee collectee ou acquise par la Ville de Montreal est consideree comme ouverte a moins d'une justification pour en restreindre l'acces.' The city also commits to publishing 'un inventaire des donnees sous sa fiducie, peu importe leur degre d'ouverture' (an inventory of the data in its stewardship, whatever its degree of openness), and describes the Charte as setting out 'un ensemble de principes ethiques encadrant la gestion des donnees et leurs usages a la Ville'.
↗ CNW/Newswire — Montreal adopte une Politique de donnees ouvertes reposant sur le concept d'ouverture par defautDates the policy: adopted 9 December 2015 and put to the conseil municipal on 14 December for approval. A companion release frames it as a 'refonte' — an overhaul of the earlier policy from the 2011-2012 demarche, not a first adoption. Confirms it is a politique adopted by council resolution, with no by-law (reglement) anywhere in the chain.
↗ Ville de Montreal — Inventaire de donnees (dataset)The Politique's one concrete, checkable deliverable, and it is live: 'Inventaire de donnees collige par la Ville de Montreal dans le cadre de l'application de la Politique de donnees ouvertes' — an inventory compiled in application of the policy, covering central services, boroughs and agglomeration competencies. CKAN metadata: created 2018-02-19, last modified 2026-05-06, so still maintained.
↗ Ville de Montreal — Charte des donnees numeriques (PDF, octobre 2020)The charter itself, dated October 2020. Initiated in May 2019 at the launch of Montreal numerique and drafted with the Laboratoire d'innovation urbaine, the Service des technologies de l'information, and academic and community partners.
↗ Ville de Montreal — La charte des donnees numeriques au service de la collectiviteEstablishes that the Charte is hortatory, not binding: it sets out 'les engagements que prend la Ville' (commitments the city makes) to frame 'la collecte, la gestion et l'utilisation des donnees de facon ethique et responsable dans l'espace urbain'. 13 principles under 3 headings — guaranteeing human rights in the digital age; the primacy of the general interest and the common good; putting data to work for the future. No algorithm register, accountability framework or reporting mechanism is named.
↗ Ville de Montreal — CKAN API, status_showConfirms the platform: 'ckan_version': '2.11.5', 'site_title': 'Site web des donnees ouvertes de la Ville de Montreal', with a 'montreal_theme' extension plus dcat, harvest, spatial and datastore extensions. Queried 26 July 2026.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Montreal Open Data Portal & Digital Data Charter” — Montreal, Canada. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/montreal-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
