How we update

groups of official and public sources feed the site. Every morning a routine downloads each source, checks it and saves it. Every block on the site shows underneath where it came from and when it was updated (“Source … · updated …”).

When each piece of data is from

Source	What it brings	Frequency	Last update
House of Commons2 sources	members of Parliament, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, ridings and parties	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:04 PM
Senate of Canada	senators, the province each represents, and Senate groups	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:04 PM
Provincial and territorial legislatures13 sources	members of each legislature, premiers, ridings and parties	daily1 by hand	Oct 30, 2026, 12:05 PM2 sources behind schedule
Quebec Répertoire des municipalités	mayors and councillors of every municipal council in Quebec	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:05 PM
NWT Municipal and Community Affairs	mayors, councillors and community leaders in the Northwest Territories	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:07 PM
City websites26 sources	mayor and council of large cities outside Quebec	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:09 PM1 source behind schedule
Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons	openly licensed photos, with author and licence	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:10 PM
Wikidata	earlier roles of MPs and senators: past terms, ridings, parties, ministries and other public offices	daily	Oct 30, 2026, 12:11 PM
Natural Earth	province and territory boundaries for the map	when boundaries change	Oct 28, 2026, 1:12 AM

“Behind schedule” means a source's last good load is older than its frequency. It happens when an official site is down or changes its format: the update stops and flags it instead of saving wrong data.

How the routine works

The routine runs by itself on GitHub Actions, one source after another. Times are in UTC, with Ottawa time alongside.

Every day at 09:30 UTC (4:30 or 5:30 a.m. in Ottawa):: House of Commons, Senate, the legislatures, Quebec's municipal directory, the NWT communities and the city websites, then photos and earlier roles for anyone new, then the coverage report.
By hand, when it changes:: the Yukon Legislative Assembly, whose site blocks automated reading. A copy of the page is saved in a browser and loaded from there.
When boundaries change:: the map shapes, rebuilt from Natural Earth.

When a download fails, it is tried again up to three times (six for the NWT site, which is often slow). If a source still fails, or suddenly returns far fewer people than the day before (under 90%), its update stops and the run is marked as failed. The site keeps the previous data, with its date, until the next good read. Someone leaves office on the site only after missing from their source two days in a row, and nothing is deleted. The raw files from every run are kept for 90 days, so any number can be traced back to what the source published.

Every source and its licence

Each source with a link to the page we read, its terms of use, and its last good load.

House of Commons

Senate of Canada

Senate of Canada: list of senatorsSenate of Canada intellectual property terms (non-commercial reproduction)Oct 30, 2026, 12:04 PM

Provincial and territorial legislatures

Quebec Répertoire des municipalités

Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l'Habitation: Répertoire des municipalités, elected officialsCC BY 4.0 (Données Québec). The Répertoire is informational and has no legal value: officials are proclaimed by each municipality's returning officerOct 30, 2026, 12:05 PM

NWT Municipal and Community Affairs

NWT Municipal and Community Affairs: community governmentsGovernment of the Northwest Territories website (no published reuse terms; MACA notes the list is updated as changes are reported)Oct 30, 2026, 12:07 PM

City websites