Publicly available information is essential to democratic government and rational policy making. It is the life blood of fair and effective public policy. Unfortunately, Canada does not have a national repository of information on social programs and socioeconomic data. The need to fill this data gap is becoming all the more pressing as the federal government sheds important data sources. The Caledon Institute believes that the public interest is best served by a robust public capacity to collect and analyze data. But the federal government clearly is not going to change direction and restore lost sources of information any time soon. So Caledon will fill the breach and launch a <i>Canada Social Report</i>, starting with our rescue of the National Council of Welfare’s series on welfare incomes and poverty trends.