Contact

No address is printed on this page yet, and the reason is the plain one. There is no form here, no field to fill in and no line to ring, which is settled policy. But a written route is missing too, and that is a fact about how far along the desk is rather than a way of keeping anybody at arm's length. A printed route that nobody stands behind is worse than none at all: it is read as an open door, and the reader who walks through it hears nothing back and never learns why.

Reaching the desk will be possible and it will work in the obvious way. When a mailbox exists and somebody is answering it, the route to it is published here, on this page, and nowhere else. So this page is the whole of the answer at any given moment. What it says is what is available, and a route to this masthead that somebody met somewhere other than here did not come from the desk.

What is worth sending

A correction, with the document that settles it, is the most useful message this desk can receive, and a page that turns out to be wrong is changed at the record rather than patched in the prose. Almost as useful is a document that fills one of the fields left deliberately empty. Those fields are listed on the pages that carry them and each one names the evidence that would close it: a provincial statistics release for a total the federal table withholds, a consolidated statute from a government site that will not answer an automated request, or an order naming a department whose current title two of its own pages contradict. Anyone who happens to hold one of those has something the desk cannot get for itself.

The editorial standards page explains how a source is stored and cited, and reading it first will usually answer a question about why a page says what it says.

What happens to a message

One that reaches the desk is read, and it is answered where an answer is owed. It stays in the mailbox that received it, serves the reply and no other purpose, and joins no mailing list. Say the word afterwards and it goes. The privacy notice sets out what the site itself records about a visit, which is nothing, and what the platform serving it records, which is not nothing. This publication would rather say that plainly than leave a reader to assume either one.