Licence and citation

What you may do with this data, the exact attribution it requires, and the parts of this site the data licence does not cover.

The short version: the database is free to reuse, including commercially, provided the attribution below travels with it. The longer version matters because three things on this site are not the database — portrait images, any biographical prose adapted from an encyclopedia, and the source documents themselves — and each is governed separately. Reusing them under the data licence would misstate obligations for everyone downstream.

The licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

CC-BY-4.0

What it covers

The Crossing the Floor Database: the events, participants, persons, parties, jurisdictions, classifications, claims, citation metadata and release manifests authored by this project, and the project’s own written descriptions of them in English and French.

The exact attribution string

Crossing the Floor (crossingthefloor.ca), CC BY 4.0

Carry this string verbatim. Do not paraphrase it.

The full attribution block

This block appears in the README of every downloadable package and is the form to use where there is room for it — in a data appendix, a methodology note, or a repository.

Party-affiliation facts compiled from public parliamentary records, including PARLINFO (Library of Parliament) and the House of Commons of Canada, together with provincial and territorial legislatures and election authorities. This is not an official publication of the Senate, the House of Commons, a provincial legislature or the Library of Parliament, and is not endorsed by them. Reproductions of parliamentary proceedings are accurate to the best of our ability and are not presented as official. Portrait images are individually credited and are not covered by the data licence. Any biographical text adapted from an encyclopedia is separately marked and licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The Crossing the Floor Database is released under CC BY 4.0: Crossing the Floor (crossingthefloor.ca), CC BY 4.0.

What the licence does not cover

Portrait images

Status: Not covered by the data licence. Each image is licensed by whoever holds rights in it, and those rights are third-party rights that this project cannot grant.
What this means in practice: Images are credited individually with their author, licence and source page. They are never included in data exports or packages; those carry the image address and the credit fields only. An image whose rights basis cannot be established is removed rather than displayed with a hopeful label, and images whose only basis was another site’s internal non-free-content policy are being removed, because that basis does not transfer.

Biographical prose adapted from an encyclopedia

Status: Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by its own source, not CC BY 4.0. Share-alike attaches to it and would attach to any adaptation of it.
What this means in practice: Such text is marked at the field level with its source article and its licence, and is excluded from the CC BY 4.0 distribution and from any package. Letting share-alike text ride inside a product labelled CC BY 4.0 would misstate the obligations of everyone downstream. The project’s intention is to replace this text with prose written in-house in both languages, at which point the carve-out ends. Using such an article as a lead — reading it, then verifying the facts against official records and writing our own entry — creates no share-alike obligation, because facts are outside the licence entirely.

The source documents themselves

Status: Not ours to license. Every source in the record is held as link-only.
What this means in practice: We publish the address, the locator and the bibliographic metadata, which are facts about the source. We do not republish parliamentary transcripts, news articles or official files, and data packages never contain another institution’s files.

Site code, design and visual identity

Status: Governed by the repository licence, not by the data licence.
What this means in practice: Each data release records its data licence and its code licence separately, precisely so that the two are never confused by anyone reading a package.

Citation formats

No digital object identifier has been registered for the dataset yet. Citations carry the placeholder shown in the templates rather than an invented identifier. [DOI pending]

The dataset

When your work rests on the database as a whole: aggregate counts, trends over time, or an analysis across many records.

Template

Crossing the Floor. The Crossing the Floor Database, release {version}. crossingthefloor.ca, {year}. {doi}. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Worked example

Crossing the Floor. The Crossing the Floor Database, release 2026-08-01.1. crossingthefloor.ca, 2026. [DOI pending]. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

A single record

When you are citing one event, one person or one correction — the usual case in a news story.

Template

Crossing the Floor. “{title}” ({publicId}). The Crossing the Floor Database, release {version}. {permanentUri} (consulted {accessDate}).

Worked example

Crossing the Floor. “Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay returns to the Bloc Québécois (2026)” (CTF-E-000276). The Crossing the Floor Database, release 2026-08-01.1. https://crossingthefloor.ca/en/crossings/… (consulted 31 August 2026).

A correction

When your subject is the record’s own history — what it said before, and why it changed.

Template

Crossing the Floor. Correction {correctionId} to {recordId}, {correctedAt}. Corrections ledger, crossingthefloor.ca.

Worked example

Crossing the Floor. Correction CTF-COR-OUTCOME-000167 to CTF-E-000167, 1 August 2026. Corrections ledger, crossingthefloor.ca.

The releases page carries the current version string to quote, and the checksum of every file in it.

Licensing for research, newsrooms and institutions

The public database stays free under CC BY 4.0, and nothing on this page changes that. A paid arrangement buys work and assurances around the data, never exclusivity over it and never the removal of anyone else’s right to the same records.

What a licensed arrangement can cover is listed below. Each is quoted individually against the scope requested, because the cost is the research and verification work involved and that varies enormously between a single province and a full historical reconstruction. Requests from academic and non-profit projects are treated differently from commercial ones.

A frozen, citable extract
A versioned snapshot cut to the jurisdictions, chambers and years your work needs, issued with its own manifest and checksums so that a reviewer can confirm years later that they are holding the same file you analysed.
Per-record provenance bundles
For each record in your extract: every claim, every citation with its locator, the review passes it went through, and its full revision history. This is what an editor or a peer reviewer asks for when a finding is challenged.
Commissioned verification
Raising a defined set of records from inherited lead to corroborated or official-and-independent, against primary sources, to a deadline. The resulting records enter the public database under the same free licence as everything else — the work is what is being paid for, not private ownership of the facts.
A jurisdiction or period built to order
Coverage the record does not yet hold — a province with few records, or a period nobody has reconstructed — researched and added. The coverage report on this site shows exactly where those gaps are before you ask.
Sustained access and support
Bulk and scheduled access for a system that has to stay in step with the record, with a named contact, notification of corrections that affect records you rely on, and a response commitment in writing.

Write to the editorial address below with the jurisdictions, chambers and years you need, the unit your analysis counts in — events, participants or people — and your deadline. A reply will say plainly what the record already holds, what would have to be researched, and what that would cost. Where the answer is that the free public data already does what you need, that is the answer you will get.

[email protected]

Licence and citation

The database is published under CC BY 4.0 with one exact attribution string. Portraits and any biographical prose adapted from an encyclopedia are not covered by it, and each is governed separately.

The licence

The Crossing the Floor Database is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. You may copy it, redistribute it, adapt it and use it commercially, including in a paid product, provided you give attribution.

What is being licensed is this project’s compilation and its own writing. The underlying facts — that a named person changed affiliation on a date — are not owned by anyone, here or elsewhere. Canadian law protects the expression of a compilation and its original selection and arrangement, not the facts inside it, and Canada has no separate database right. You do not need our permission to state a fact you found here; you need it to redistribute our compilation.

Attribution means carrying this string, unchanged: Crossing the Floor (crossingthefloor.ca), CC BY 4.0. A link to the site, in a place a reader will find it, satisfies the licence.

What the licence does not cover

Three things this site displays are not part of the licensed database, and putting them inside a package labelled CC BY 4.0 would mislead whoever received it about their own obligations. Each is listed separately below with the rule that governs it.

Upstream sources and what we owe them

Party-affiliation facts in this record are compiled from public parliamentary sources, including the Library of Parliament’s PARLINFO and the House of Commons of Canada, together with provincial and territorial legislatures and election authorities. This is not an official publication of the Senate, the House of Commons, a provincial legislature or the Library of Parliament, and is not endorsed by them. Reproductions of parliamentary proceedings are accurate to the best of our ability and are not presented as official.

Where academic datasets are used for person matching or provincial scaffolding, they are credited in the release codebook with their own licences, which are not overridden by ours. The emblem of the Parliament of Canada and the logo of the Library of Parliament are not reproduced anywhere on this site, for any purpose.

How to cite

Cite a release, not a page. A release carries an immutable version string and fixed counts, so a citation to one resolves to the data as it stood on the day you used it. A citation to a live page resolves to whatever the page says today, which is precisely the failure mode this project exists to remove.

Every record also has a permanent address and a permanent identifier of the form CTF-E-nnnnnn, and neither changes when the record is corrected. Cite the identifier alongside the address: the address is convenient, the identifier is durable.

A digital object identifier has not yet been registered for the dataset. Until one is, citations carry the placeholder shown in the formats below rather than a made-up identifier.

Text last checked against the database: 2026-08-31

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The licence

What it covers

The exact attribution string

The full attribution block

What the licence does not cover

Portrait images

Biographical prose adapted from an encyclopedia

The source documents themselves

Site code, design and visual identity

Citation formats

The dataset

Template

Worked example

A single record

Template

Worked example

A correction

Template

Worked example

Licensing for research, newsrooms and institutions

A frozen, citable extract

Per-record provenance bundles

Commissioned verification

A jurisdiction or period built to order

Sustained access and support

Licence and citation

The licence

What the licence does not cover

Upstream sources and what we owe them

How to cite

The licence

What it covers

The exact attribution string

The full attribution block

What the licence does not cover

Portrait images

Biographical prose adapted from an encyclopedia

The source documents themselves

Site code, design and visual identity

Citation formats

The dataset

Template

Worked example

A single record

Template

Worked example

A correction

Template

Worked example

Licensing for research, newsrooms and institutions

A frozen, citable extract

Per-record provenance bundles

Commissioned verification

A jurisdiction or period built to order

Sustained access and support

Licence and citation

The licence

What the licence does not cover

Upstream sources and what we owe them

How to cite