Once up a time (June of 1978 to be precise) if you downloaded Environment Canada’s monthly summaries, you would have found 313 stations with “Bright Sunshine” hours.
Even two years ago, these stations were reporting sunshine data:
TORONTO LESTER B. PEARSON INT’L A
CARTWRIGHT
GOOSE A
VICTORIA INT’L A
COMOX A
VANCOUVER INT’L A
WIARTON A
As of today, only WIARTON A reports sunshine data and for May 2015 25 out of 31 days had no valid measurements.
sunshine hours 
The best way too confuse and distract is to “not report the data”!
We should be certain that if Climate ‘science’ had issues of concern relevant to actual science, efforts would be made to insure the diligent acquisition of a comprehensive dataset of the highest quality.
I’ve noticed a lot of missing data in recent years in the Environment Canada public data in stations that had almost perfectly complete data for decades. It is rather bizarre. They have also moved or dropped stations that were in place for, in some cases, over a hundred years. It is not exactly conducive to long term analysis.
According to Tim Ball, EC is in the hnads of fanatics who only care about AGW, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/08/another-model-vs-reality-problem-national-weather-offices-canada-a-case-study-with-national-and-global-implications/
Most weather stations in Canada used to be run by volunteers. Unfortunately, the average age of a volunteer today is over 80 years old, and new ones are increasingly hard to find. So as they die, so do the weather stations they run. Some have been replaced by automated ones. A volunteer station costs $3,000 thousand dollars per year to run while an automated one to replace it costs $100,000 to install, and $12,000 per year to operate after that. This means that climate monitoring is becoming increasingly expensive thanks to automation.
The other problem is the size of government. Public sector wages and benefits rise much faster than is sustainable possible so something had to give. Instead of cutting programs and reducing wages (as they should have done) they decided instead to make cuts across the board. This in effect means they’ve chosen to deliver many programs poorly instead of few programs well. Automation of lighthouses, and reduction of provincial forestry offices has also an in impact on manual weather stations.
As a means of reducing spending, the government cut EC in 1995 and again in 2001. Notice that on those two dates massive numbers of sunshine hour stations disappeared forever. Of course, AGW has added salt to the wound. The Auditor General reported that between 1998 and 2005, Environment Canada (EC) spent $6.4 billion on climate change. The money came from reducing data collection and other services. Weather stations were closed, some replaced with Automatic Weather Observing Stations (AWOS), to the detriment of the record and safety concerns. This was before anyone realized how important sunshine hours are to tracking climate change.
Certainly monitoring of the sunshine should be re-instated, but the Campbell Stokes recorder is not exactly the most precise device, and data from Canada cannot be compared to data in the USA because they use an entirely different instrument. Therefore, instead of monitoring sunshine hours, they should be monitoring solar radiation. My personal weather measure this, and dozens of other ones in BC do as well.
Cloud cover is still recorded hourly at many stations across Canada, and that’s invaluable information, but as NAV Canada has taken over the weather stations, they don’t seem to care as much about missing data, which has turned into a rampant problem these days, especially in the area of precipitation. Warmists claim that precipitation is going nuts with AGW, but they have no way to prove their case even if they’re right (which is highly unlikely).
Thank you for that information. I remember when they started to switch over to the automated stations in the mid 1990s as I knew the fellow who designed and supplied the mainboards for the computers being used. They took precautions to make them as simple and as reliable as possible but there would not be anyone on site to quickly handle any problems that might come up and obviously things will always happen from time to time.