Coverage and data sources¶
Live coverage¶
For the current, machine-readable status of every jurisdiction we cover, see the live coverage dashboard on the main site. It is generated from the same database the rest of the app reads, so it's never out of date.
The dashboard tells you, for each legislature:
- Whether the politicians roster is being maintained.
- Whether bills are being ingested.
- Whether Hansard speeches are being ingested and embedded for search.
- The last successful ingest timestamp.
- Any documented blockers (e.g. PDF-only sources, anti-bot walls).
Where the data comes from¶
All ingested data is upstream-published primary source material. We do not paraphrase or rewrite. Specifically:
| Layer | Upstream source |
|---|---|
| Federal MPs | OpenParliament + ourcommons.ca rosters |
| Federal Hansard | ourcommons.ca official transcripts |
| Federal bills | LEGISinfo |
| Provincial MLAs / MNAs / MPPs | Each legislature's official member directory |
| Provincial Hansard | Each legislature's official transcripts (HTML, XML, JSON, or PDF depending on the province) |
| Provincial bills | Each legislature's bill index |
| Riding boundaries | Elections Canada and provincial chief electoral officers |
| Hosting / domain data | Public DNS, WHOIS, and certificate transparency logs |
Where multiple official sources exist for the same fact (e.g. a federal MP's party affiliation), we cross-check rather than picking one.
What "covered" means¶
A jurisdiction is fully covered when:
- Its current sitting members are in the database with party + riding.
- Its bills are being ingested with sponsors resolved to politicians.
- Its Hansard transcripts are being ingested, chunked, and embedded for semantic search.
- All three are running on a daily schedule, not by hand.
A jurisdiction is partially covered when (1) and (2) are running but Hansard is missing, or vice versa. The coverage dashboard makes this distinction explicit.
A jurisdiction is on the roadmap when the upstream publisher's data is known to be machine-readable but we haven't built the ingester yet.
A jurisdiction is blocked when the upstream publisher only exposes data in a way we can't reasonably ingest (e.g. scanned PDFs without OCR, behind a CAPTCHA, or via a hostile WAF).
Historical coverage¶
For some legislatures we have historical Hansard going back many years (federal Hansard reaches back to the 1990s through OpenParliament, and several provinces back to the early 2000s). For others we only have the current sitting onward.
The search results page shows the date of every speech — sort by date ascending if you want to find the earliest reference to a topic, or descending for the most recent.
Data retention¶
We do not delete public legislative speech once ingested, even if the upstream legislature later removes or amends it. The original record matters for accountability. If you believe a speech is in the system in error (e.g. attributed to the wrong speaker), use the corrections flow — we'll fix the metadata without erasing the underlying content.
Reporting a coverage gap¶
If you spot a missing speech, a mis-attributed speaker, or an entire jurisdiction we should be covering, contact us. For single-record fixes, submit a correction — accepted corrections also earn credits.