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About Canadian Political Data

Canadian Political Data exists to make Canadian political activity searchable, comparable, and accountable — without forcing you through fourteen separate legislative websites to do it.

We index Hansard, politician rosters, ridings, bills, and the public hosting infrastructure of Canadian political organizations into a single queryable surface. The product surfaces what's there. It doesn't editorialize the underlying record.

What we believe

  • Civic data is public infrastructure. It should be searchable, cross-referenceable, and free at the point of use.
  • Provincial politics matters. Most coverage of Canadian politics defaults to Parliament Hill. We deliberately spend equal effort on the provinces and territories.
  • Sovereignty matters. Where a Canadian institution's data lives — who hosts it, where the bytes physically rest — is itself a question worth indexing. We track it.
  • Transparency is a stance. This product is not "neutral about whether voters should be able to see what their representatives said." It is built on the premise that they should.
  • Access without surveillance. We don't run social-login, ad retargeting, or cross-site trackers. Your research is yours.

What we don't do

  • We don't editorialize Hansard. What was said is what was said.
  • We don't memory-hole — once a speech is in the corpus, it stays.
  • We don't republish private information about politicians. Public role, public statements, public votes; not private life.
  • We don't take political-party donations or sponsorships. The product is funded by credit purchases for premium reports.

Who runs it

Canadian Political Data is built and operated by The Bunker Operations (BNKops) — a Canadian cooperative collective based in amiskwaciy-waskahikan (Edmonton), Treaty 6 territory.

BNKops works with community organizations on strategy, campaigns, and technology, with a focus on open-source, self-hosted, low-cost, and corporation-free infrastructure. CPD is the same thesis applied to civic data: a public-interest alternative to centralized, advertising-funded political information services.

The team:

Contacts:

Sister projects

CPD sits alongside other BNKops work on community-controlled infrastructure:

  • BNKops Repository — a community-driven, open-source documentation platform.
  • Change Maker (cmlite.org) — campaign and website management tooling for community organizations.

If your organization needs help with strategy, organizing, or ethics-first infrastructure, bnkops.com is the right starting point — that's the consulting side of the work. CPD itself is a public good, free to use, with no consulting required.

Naming

  • The public-facing brand is Canadian Political Data, at the domain canadianpoliticaldata.org.
  • The internal codename for the system is SovereignWatch. You may see this name in technical references; it refers to the same project.

License and reuse

The data we surface is all upstream public information. We don't claim copyright over the underlying speeches, votes, or roster facts.

For reuse of the data:

  • Casual citation (a journalist quoting a speech with a link back to us) — go ahead, no permission needed.
  • Bulk extraction or republication — please contact us so we can talk about scale, attribution, and whether a structured data export fits your project better than scraping.

The site's UI, code, and report-generation system are not public-domain. Don't republish the rendered reports as your own work.

See also