Editorial Standards

Every fact in our coverage of Canadian industry resolves to a document that was retrieved once, stored, and can be opened again by anyone reading this. What follows is short because most of it is mechanical: the build fails rather than warns, and the few rules that depend on a person keeping them are marked as such below.

Where the material comes from

The cache behind the site holds 36 documents, each one fetched once and saved as the original file with a plain text extraction beside it and a literal retrieval date recorded against it. They are consolidated statutes, federal and provincial statistical tables cited by their product identifiers rather than by a URL that moves, and departmental pages read for what a department calls itself. An aggregator restating a figure is not the source of it and is not cited as one. Kept in the same folder is a log of what went wrong during retrieval: hosts that refuse an automated request outright, statute landing pages whose text turns out to be navigation, two government sites that answer a missing page with a success code, and a filing service that returns a block page while reporting success. Any of those failures, taken at face value, produces a confident wrong citation.

What a figure has to carry

Numbers are not typed into prose on this site. A figure reaches a page through a component that takes the identifier of a stored source record and throws if the identifier does not resolve, so an unattributed number breaks the build instead of rendering as a plausible line. Beside the value the same component prints the year, the concept being measured and the publisher, and the concept is there because two real federal totals for the same year can measure different quantities. One such pair sits behind the mining section: a value of production and a value of shipments, collected differently, neither one a revision of the other. They are never averaged and neither is offered as a check on the other.

Fields that stay empty

Across the jurisdiction and commodity records, 22 fields read the words not established, and each carries a stored note giving the reason and naming the evidence that would close it. The reasons are specific rather than a shrug. Statistics Canada suppresses several provincial totals to meet the confidentiality requirements of its own Act, and no neighbouring year is quietly substituted for a suppressed one. Two territorial governments refused every request made to their sites, so their mining statutes and department titles are blank rather than guessed from a federal page that covers assessment instead of tenure. One department title is blank because two pages published by that same government disagree and the index entry links to an address that returns an error. An empty field that says what would fill it is information; a plausible one is not.

What a review date means

A date shown on a reference page is a literal stored with the record, written when a person last read that record against the document behind it. No part of the build generates it. Rebuilding the site does not move it, which is the whole point: if every page restamped itself on each deploy, a genuine correction would be indistinguishable from a deploy that changed nothing, and the one page that moved would be buried under thirty-nine that did not.

There is no fixed interval between readings and none is claimed here. A record is re-read when the body that published its source issues a new edition, when a reader sends a correction, or when a page built on it is rewritten. Until one of those happens the date stays where it is and says something true and unflattering: nothing has been checked since. That is a rule kept by a person rather than by the build, and it is stated plainly so a reader can weigh it accordingly.

What the build refuses to ship

A guard reads the finished HTML on every build and fails it rather than warning. It requires that each rendered date be a literal present in the records, that every stored document be cited by at least one page, that every citation resolve to a document, that no image ship without alternative text, and that no two pages share fifty-five characters of running text. It also bans a short list of phrases this masthead must never apply to itself, and each check has a matching test that proves the check can still fail. Corrections are the reason the contact page exists, and one that arrives with the document settling it will be acted on faster than one that arrives without.