Data
The Rainbow Index, initially developed by ILGA-Europe, is a comprehensive tool that ranks European countries based on the legal and policy practices affecting LGBTQI people. This ranking is done annually and has been in place since 2009. It evaluates countries on a scale of 0 to 100 percent, where 100 percent signifies the enactment of all indexed laws and policies to promote equality and respect for human rights for LGBTQI+ people.
Rainbow Canada adopted the 2020 index version (current at the project's launch). It determined whether Canada and its provinces and territories had enacted laws or policies consistent with criteria established by the European index. Following ILGA-Europe’s approach, our national scores reflect national and subnational legislation. In other words, if no federal law existed for any given policy area, but all provinces had implemented legislation, Canada would receive a full score for that item. Canada would receive half the score if only half of the provinces complied. Provincial scores were estimated based on the number of provinces at the time. Therefore, each province represented 12th of the score until 1998 and 13th starting in 1999, when the Nunavut territory was created.
Provincial/territorial scores exclude two domains: asylum and hate speech, as they were deemed applicable exclusively at the federal level. These provincial/territorial scores (which lack two domains) were scaled up to match the 100 points in the original index.
Rainbow Canada prioritized the ability of its users to inspect temporal trends. Therefore, Egale’s legal team identified not only which policies were active but also when they became effective, starting in 1975. We also aimed to show how provinces and territories have evolved over time. Therefore, subnational scores were made available.
When comparing Canada to other nations, we used the data from the most recent version of Rainbow Europe (2023), while using the 2022 criteria for both Canada and the US (these scores were developed by the same research team that put together the scores for Canada in partnership with the Williams Institute). This comparison is imperfect because some criteria for the index changed between 2022 and 2023, but it still allows for a general overview of LGBTQI policy changes across countries.
The dataset below contains the annual scores from 2SLGBTQI policy changes in Canadian provinces and territories from 1975 to 2019.
You can download or reuse these datasets under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By).
- Download the scores below
Please use the following citation when using these data:
Delgado-Ron, J. A., Rich, A., Salway, T., & Jensen, B. (2024, February 8). Rainbow Canada Open Data. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VJX4T