This goes back a long way. Amazing amounts of GIS data for the U.S. was available from tonnes of vendors sliced and diced in all sorts of interesting way on a CD-ROMs for < $100 way back in 1996. Canada, not so much. $3,000-15,000 for similar data. Because StatsCan and other organizations were selling it to big corporations who could pay that price tag... the result of that policy? Google maps could never have started in Canada.