Established in 2000, the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) is a national research infrastructure for leading edge research and training in the quantitative social and population health sciences, creating social, economic, health and environmental benefits for Canadians. The Network supports a partnership between Canadian universities and Statistics Canada. Its mission is to enable quantitative researchers to address vital questions; train the next generation of highly qualified personnel in social and population health sciences; and contribute to evidence-based policy and decision-making by facilitating access to confidential microdata supported by state-of-the-art computing facilities. There are four key strategic pillars set out in the current CRDCN Strategic Plan (2024-29): data; community and capabilities; evidence-informed decision-making; and research ecosystem.  

This national facility is run by a central management team based at McMaster University as the host institution. It is led by the Executive Director who reports to a national Board and at McMaster to the Vice President Research, who also serves on the Board. CRDCN is a distributed network, currently comprising 33 physical Research Data Centres (RDCs) based in Collaborating Institutions, each led by an Academic Director, whose roles and responsibilities are overseen by CRDCN. The CRDCN currently serves over 2,000 researchers and trainees in all 10 provinces. 

CRDCN is primarily funded by federal and provincial government agencies—namely Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ)—as well as Statistics Canada and 33 Collaborating Institutions. The total budget from these and other funding sources in the current funding term is $80M (2023-2029). CRDCN is one of only 17 CFI Major Science Initiatives. CRDCN also manages additional CFI funding ($10M) to build an advanced research computing platform, which will centralize physical and remote data access to all RDCs via two Compute Canada data centres located at the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University. CRDCN’s central management team will take on new responsibilities to operate and maintain this advanced research computing platform upon completion of its build. 

This position is funded by a grant from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada under the National Data Spaces Pilot. The CRDCN project involves developing a Social Sciences CANada Data Space (SSCAN) to support a wide range of data needs for researchers in Canada working with sensitive social sciences data.