A couple of posts ago I mentioned that digital elevation data was freely available from Geobase for most of the country at 1:50,000 and for all of the country at 1:250,000. Here is some related information on the data collection happening for the Far North.

Natural Resources Canada would ideally like to have complete 1:50,000 coverage for the entire country but the cost of collecting and producing this data is prohibitive. There is and area the equivalent of about 1,500 1:50,000 topographic maps in the Far North that have never been mapped. These are remote areas with rugged terrain that are covered in snow and ice most, if not all of the time, making traditional data collection challenging and difficult.

In December 2002 NRCAN performed tests “performed tests to produce maps and digital elevation models with Earth observation data from satellites,” specifically Radarsat and Landsat. The results were promising enough for NRCAN to award contracts to produce 150 topographic sheets by this process. “This approach will use aerial photography as source for planimetric data and the GeoBase Landsat 7 orthoimage for updating. DEMs are produced from ERS radar data or aerial photography depending on the type of terrain.” The plan is to produce the data for 150 1:50,000 topographic sheets per year.
Read the two short articles on the project on NRCAN’s website (“New Mapping in the North with Satellite Data” and “Topographic Data Acquisition in Northern Canada”).