1. Scope
The archive covers formal affiliation or caucus-status changes by federal and provincial legislators while they hold a seat. Changes occurring only between terms are out of scope unless needed to explain a chronology.
Joining a party, leaving to sit as an independent, expulsion, suspension, party formation or dissolution, merger, caucus departure, and return are distinct transition types.
2. Counting rules
An event is a dated historical occurrence. A person is a durable political identity. A participation is one person’s affiliation change within an event. These denominators are never interchangeable.
A collective move is one event with one participant row per named person. An approximate group total remains an event estimate; it is never converted into invented people.
- Event: count once per coherent historical occurrence.
- Person: deduplicate name variants and alternate identities.
- Participation: count once per person per event.
- Later return: create a new event and participation.
3. Dates and jurisdictions
Every date has explicit precision: day, month, year, circa, range, or unknown. An inherited year is not silently converted to January 1.
Jurisdictions, legislatures, chambers, and sessions use stable identifiers. Historical names and variants remain aliases without splitting aggregates.
4. Claim types
A record fact, reported statement, politician’s claim, project analysis, disputed interpretation, unknown, and counterfactual hypothesis are distinct data types.
Motives are not inferred from an outcome. A legislator’s statement is attributed and cited; it is not presented as an objective explanation.
5. Evidence and reliability tiers
Each material claim has its own citations. A source retains publisher, author, date and precision, language, URL, archived copy, page, paragraph or timestamp locator, access date, checksum, OCR state, rights status, and reliability tier.
Publication requires at least one reliable confirmation and seeks both an official or primary source and an independent secondary source. A single source, unresolved source, or conflict keeps a case out of verified status.
- Tier A: official record or authenticated primary source.
- Tier B: established independent reporting or scholarly research.
- Tier C: secondary reference useful for research direction.
- Tier D: unverified lead, aggregator, or link without sufficient provenance.
6. Publication gate
A verified case must have resolved participants or explained uncertainty, claim-level evidence for every material assertion, complete editions in both languages, and recorded fact and language checks. AI source checks may publish literal source-bound facts; living-person and contentious claims use an enhanced protocol requiring stronger corroboration, precision, and provenance.
The database prevents an event from being marked published without verified status and corroborated evidence. Leads are available only in research surfaces that display their state clearly.
7. English and French
The editions are equal publications, not a partially translated English interface. Every public field tracks source language, translator, reviewer, machine assistance, version, and outdated state.
Official institutional names and Canadian French parliamentary terminology take priority. An outdated translation blocks publication of the corresponding revision.
8. Outcomes and analysis
The inherited 0–5 benefit score is retired. Appointments, elections, offices, resignations, retirements, and other outcomes are recorded separately, with evidence and explicit unknown or pending states.
Project analysis carries a byline, data, assumptions, limitations, and confidence. A counterfactual is never canonical fact and must expose counterarguments.
9. Corrections and versions
An accepted correction creates a durable material revision, connects the submission where consent allows, and appears in the public ledger. Identifiers, prior citations, and data versions are never reused.
A withdrawn record remains resolvable with its status and decision reason; it does not silently disappear.
10. Automated assistance
Automation may research, perform OCR, translate, match entities, detect duplicates, and publish a literal fact when its sources, locators, method, confidence, and uncertainty are recorded.
An AI source check never converts motive, an alleged reward, causation, or a disputed interpretation into fact. Those remain separate attributed statements, analysis, disputes, or unknowns. Every automated validation records its rule, sources, locators, checksum scope, and excluded inferences.
11. Known limitations as of August 1, 2026
Release 2026-08-01.1 contains 239 event records, 231 participant records, 153 sources, 28 outcomes, and 74 governed translation records. Thirty-five events are verified; 10 group events remain unresolved. Withdrawn records and research leads are retained to preserve history, so these totals are not a count of confirmed crossings.
Only 66 event leads have a cited source, and source monitoring contains 98 observations. AI source checks are disclosed as automated rather than human reviews. Live measures on the audit page show each later improvement separately; they never claim to measure a complete national history.