A week of coverage, commerce, and one big licence change

Eight days, thirty-eight commits. The kind of week that warrants stepping back from "what did we ship today" to "what shape is the project in now." Three big threads ran in parallel — provincial coverage, monetization, and one quiet-but-load-bearing governance decision.

Coverage exploded

The headline number is more than 750,000 new Hansard speeches added across the corpus this week. The breakdown:

Manitoba went from "no Hansard ingest" to a fully backfilled historical record in three commits. Current sessions (43-1, 43-2, 43-3) landed first with about 30,000 speeches; a historical backfill across Legislatures 39 through 43 added another 292,000; and a Word97-era parser unlocked the older legs 37–38 (1999–2007) for a further 115,000. Plus 764 former MLAs spanning 1870 to present, sourced from the Manitoba Assembly's own archives.

Quebec got the historical treatment too — session 43-2 landed earlier in the week (14,784 speeches), then a backfill across 8 prior sessions added another 313,000.

Ontario got an MPP roster reaching back through the historical record, plus a pre-2007 Hansard parser that handles the older hand-typeset transcript format the Legislative Assembly published before switching to structured XML.

New Brunswick and Newfoundland went live during what one commit message calls "the post-reboot digest" — Hansard pipelines for both, plus an Alberta historical-MLAs pass and a Nova Scotia speaker-roster job.

British Columbia and Quebec got historical-roster backfills late in the week, finishing the "every politician who's ever served" ambition for two more provinces.

A tier-1 presiding-officer speech-attribution resolver landed too — when a speech is attributed to "The Speaker" or "Madame la Présidente" in the source, we now resolve that to the actual politician occupying the chair at the time. Plus BC-specific resolver fixes for edge cases that the bilingual chamber turned up.

The Hansard ingest pipeline itself got reliability work: timeout handling, stale-job recovery for the worker queue. At this volume of backfill those weren't optional — a transient network blip a few hours into a 100k-speech run shouldn't require restarting from zero.

The billing rail went live

Earlier in the week the Stripe billing rail shipped — credit ledger, checkout flow, the whole append-only money-as-data design — backing the AI report-generation feature. The architectural notes on the ledger discipline (no mutable balance column, ever; the partial unique index that catches duplicate Stripe events at the application layer) live in CLAUDE.md for anyone reading the source.

Two days later, Stripe Tax for Canadian GST/HST/PST was wired in behind a STRIPE_TAX_ENABLED runtime flag. With the flag flipped (and the matching activation done in the Stripe dashboard), checkout calculates Canadian sales tax based on the buyer's billing address and preserves the breakdown on the receipt. Without it, the existing checkout path is unchanged — a clean opt-in.

Corrections that get accepted now grant credits as a reward to the submitter (10 credits per accepted correction, by default), with an email notification on the grant. The grant is idempotent — flipping a correction applied → triaged → applied doesn't double-pay — and anonymous corrections skip the grant silently, since there's no account to attribute to. This is the start of the "corrections with credit" loop the accounts post flagged a week earlier.

Search got serious polish

A round of search-UX work cleaned up the Hansard search page:

• New filters: a min_similarity floor (so you can demand high-confidence semantic matches), parliament + session filters (so you can scope to a specific sitting), and speech_type (to exclude procedural interjections from research-quality queries).
• Sort modes for the results pane, with a dense-grid presentation when sorted "by politician."
• Inline view tabs and sort chips on a single row — less vertical real-estate spent on chrome, more on results.
• Inline save-search button as a green CTA next to the search bar, reducing the click cost of converting a useful search into a recurring alert.

The lander itself also got a redesign: flatter layout, a two-card hero (semantic search + map), and corpus statistics surfaced more prominently.

"In Beta" — said out loud

The header now carries an In Beta badge with a hover panel explaining the project's maturity status, and the lander shipped a companion modal.

Why it matters: there's enough data to do real research with — well over a million speeches across the federal corpus and a growing list of provincial legislatures, plus a working semantic-search pipeline — but coverage gaps remain (PEI, Yukon, parts of the federal historical record), the AI report feature is still settling, and the dataset download isn't yet published. Saying "beta" out loud is more useful than pretending otherwise.

And one quiet but load-bearing change

The project relicensed from MIT to PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 mid-week.

The reasoning: the public-facing site is and will stay free for personal use, journalism, research, education, and civic-tech work. The underlying corpus and infrastructure represent significant ongoing engineering work that needs to sustain itself, and that gets harder if the codebase is a free input to ad-tech, surveillance, or political-targeting products. PolyForm Noncommercial draws a clean line: open and free for noncommercial use, separately licensed for commercial use.

If you're using the source for personal research or building tools for a civic-tech project, nothing changes. If you're integrating it into a paid product, contact us about a commercial licence. The full text lives in the repo at /LICENSE.

What's next

The next-priority work is filling the remaining provincial Hansard gaps — Saskatchewan, then breaking through the WAFs that block PEI and Yukon — and pushing the federal historical backfill the rest of the way. After that, the public dataset download (currently flagged "coming soon" on the contributors page) gets finalized once the user-data scrubbing review is done.

This is the rhythm the project will hold for a while: provinces, then infrastructure, then back to provinces. If a jurisdiction you care about is missing, the coverage dashboard is the honest scoreboard.

If you find a misattribution or a missing politician along the way — and at this volume, you will — the corrections page is where to flag it. Accepted corrections now earn credits. Two-way just got a little more two-way.