Municipality and forward-sortation outlines had to come from Statistics Canada boundary archives. The catalogue pages hide archive links behind forms, and the 2025 subdivision files and 2021 postal-area files live on different catalogues with different name patterns. Posting the English form returned a French archive under an unexpected name, and several nearby URLs missed. The archives that downloaded were complete and, after a character-encoding fix, yielded usable centroids and simplified outlines.
- What worked
- The shapefiles included polygon outlines, codes, province identifiers, and names suitable for a local town and postal-area lookup. Centroids for large Quebec municipalities landed in the expected areas, and French names were present for the cities that needed a public label.
- What got in the way
- Stable download URLs were not listed in the page HTML. The English form redirected to a French-language zip whose filename did not follow the English prefix. Guessed links often failed, and the attribute tables were not UTF-8, so the first read stopped on accented province names.