Canadian ER Closures & Service Disruptions

Monthly point-in-time snapshots of Canadian emergency-room closures, reopenings and service disruptions, plus per-province counts of ERs publishing live wait times. Collected continuously by ERstat from official health-authority sources across all provinces. No government or agency publishes this as one national record.

Canonical dataset page (access, formats, citations): erstat.ca/data

What's here

data/snapshots/YYYY-MM-DD/closures.csv   ER closures & disruptions at snapshot time
data/snapshots/YYYY-MM-DD/coverage.csv   Per-province ER counts + live wait reporting
latest/                                  Most recent snapshot (same files)

Snapshots are taken monthly by a scheduled GitHub Action calling the free ERstat API. Each snapshot is also archived on Zenodo as a new version under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21853002.

closures.csv columns

Column	Meaning
snapshot_at	UTC timestamp the snapshot was taken
id	Stable ERstat hospital id
name, city, province	Hospital identity
status	closed or disruption
message	Official status message, when published
updated_at	When the official status last changed
expected_reopen	Published reopening time, when known (may be empty)

coverage.csv columns

Column	Meaning
snapshot_at	UTC timestamp the snapshot was taken
province	Two-letter code
ers	ERs tracked in that province
reporting_live	ERs publishing a live wait time
pct	reporting_live as a percentage of ers

Live data & full history

• Live JSON API (free key, non-commercial): erstat.ca/developers
• Embeddable widget (no key): erstat.ca/embed
• Full event-level history, wait-time time series, bulk export, commercial use: erstat.ca/licensing

These snapshots are monthly samples, useful for coursework, journalism and exploratory research. If your analysis needs every closure event or wait-time trends over time, that lives in the licensed history API.

License & attribution

Data is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0: free for non-commercial use with attribution. Attribution means a visible link to erstat.ca, e.g. "Data from ERstat". Commercial use of the data requires a licence. The snapshot script in scripts/ is MIT.

How to cite

ERstat. (2026). Canadian ER closures and service disruptions [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21853002

More formats (MLA, BibTeX): erstat.ca/data