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You can find the Globe and Mail article here (“Ottawa plots making maps without paper”)
Fold maps no more — they’re going digital
By K. Margaret Kelly
Producer: Chad Pawson
OTTAWA | March 31, 2006 — From Google Maps to GPS devices, digital technologies are quickly replacing paper topographic maps, a phenomenon that may threaten the livelihood of specialty Canadian map sellers.
Natural Resources Canada will close its topographic map warehouse in Ottawa in January 2007. Paper maps will be replaced by digital files available on the Internet, and the federal government will stop producing maps for distribution in 11 outlets across the country.
“They’re going to close the warehouse and destroy millions of dollars of maps and then private companies will be printing out the exact same maps and selling them at a higher price,” says Brad Green, president of World of Maps Inc. in Ottawa.
Green’s business is one of the regional distribution centres that will use the government’s digital files for printing topographic maps. His clientele include people in fields such as geology, mining and forestry who can’t afford or don’t have access to expensive map plotters used for printing full-sized maps.
Closing the warehouse will force private sellers to print maps on demand, says Green, causing the price to go up and rendering maps of more remote areas difficult to find, except through special order.
| ‘They sort of brag about it as if it’s some move to embrace the digital revolution, but that’s just a smokescreen. It’s just an excuse to eliminate a service.’ |
The government mandate no longer includes having the whole country mapped out on paper, says Green. Now they will rely on private companies like his who can’t afford to print maps unless they are specially requested by customers.
“I’m looking for an upside but I can’t really find it,” he says.
“They sort of brag about it as if it’s some move to embrace the digital revolution, but that’s just a smokescreen. It’s just an excuse to eliminate a service.”
But John Dawson, director of Natural Resources Canada’s Centre for Topographic Information, says paper maps are an obsolete way of presenting geospatial information.
“As soon as you generate a topographic map, you’ve fixed the information temporally,” he says.
“When you’re looking at over 14, 000 map sheets at the scale of 1 to 50, 000 to cover Canada, there’s no way we can keep that information, in a paper format, up to date.”
Computers have also changed the way people want to view topographic data.
He cites the popularity of services like Google Maps and Google Earth that make maps interactive, providing 2D and 3D images and allowing users to query features of the map.
Natural Resources Canada allows companies like Google to use some of their geospatial information even though the ministry intends to run similar services for free online. It’s an informal arrangement provided at no cost.
Dawson says he doesn’t see supplying Google as a conflict of interest.
“If Google Earth is using my topographic maps, do I care? I don’t care. How people access those are not as important to me as to ensure that I provide the best information for people to use.”
‘Plot on demand‘ — printing maps made to order — is also a cost effective way to manage the country’s topographic map needs, Dawson says. Private sellers can cut down on storage costs and recover the cost of buying a plotter within a year.
Sellers like Green, however, disagree. He believes the cost of buying a plotter won’t easily be recovered if the maps themselves are available for free online.
Although the ministry was never permitted to profit from its map sales, Dawson maintains that private sellers can make money if they provide a better product that is fairly priced in comparison with printing services offered by companies like Staples. A full-scale map printed at Staples will cost $35, Dawson says, whereas private map sellers can do it better for less.
“We know what our costs are,” Dawson says.
The ministry’s “plot value” is about $5 a map, including salary, inks and rental space.
“We feel that private industry should be able to do it at the same value,” he says, adding that Natural Resources Canada will use the money it saves from closing the map warehouse to “focus on data quality” of the digital files.
Michael Sawada, a geography professor at the University of Ottawa, says the number of paper maps sold by the government has decreased drastically in the last few years.
“A lot of people don’t like the fact that NRCan has stopped producing paper maps, but I think what they’ve done is a really innovative step towards increasing the amount of business opportunities for mapping in Canada,” he says.
Savvy ecotourism companies or hiking outfitters are just some of the businesses that could take advantage of having reliable topographic data available online and ready to print on demand, Sawada says. Not to mention new recreational games like Geocaching.
“It’s a matter of maybe looking at this as an opportunity to diversify the business of just selling paper maps and get in on it now while that’s the place to be because you have a chance to become a leader.” 