DossierCanada — who sits and votes in Canada's Parliament
Challenged bills
✋ Challenge a billFederal MPs
Who represents you, how they vote, how often they sit.
The federal Cabinet
Who decides what, since when, and how they vote.
Up to date. These ministers come directly from the official Cabinet page on pm.gc.ca, scraped live — not a hand-maintained list.
Federal bills
Every bill summarized in plain language. Not clear enough? Ask for an explanation.
✋ What does “challenging” mean?
Clicking “Ask for an explanation” is a citizen request for the bill's sponsor to explain it in plain language — and for us to keep an eye on it together.
An account (email) is required — one request per person, no anonymous requests. 🔥 At 1,000 requests on the same bill, a public post is made, in the hope an MP agrees to sponsor a petition to the House.
It works on any bill, including one that has already received royal assent — that is often the one people want to understand.
Votes in the Commons
Every recorded vote — who voted what, and by what margin.
On the “who voted what” detail — the House of Commons publishes each member's name for every recorded (nominal) vote (Yea / Nay / paired). The by-member breakdown above (the "+" button on each row) comes directly from that official source (ourcommons.ca), not an estimate. The party shown next to each name is taken from the current House roster; people who have since left the House appear separately under "Former members".
How to read a vote
Recorded vote
Members vote one by one and each choice is entered in the public record. That is what lets us say exactly who voted what — no interpretation.
Passed is not law
A passed vote clears ONE stage. A bill must pass both chambers and then receive royal assent before it becomes law.
Paired is not absent
In the Commons, two members from opposing sides can agree not to vote: their voices cancel out. It is neither an absence nor an abstention.
Promesses électorales
What was promised in 2025, and what Parliament did with it. No verdict.
Why no verdict?
Because a measure written into an assented law is not necessarily applied, or funded as promised — and because calling it “kept” or “broken” on your behalf, using only what a monitoring site can read, would be dishonest.
So you get both sides, each sourced: on the left, the promise quoted word for word from the party's own platform, with a link to the document. On the right, the bills that implement it, with the sentence from the official summary that proves it. The judgment is yours.
DossierCanada updates
What changed on the site, newest first
Hi! My name is
Martin Archambault
I'm 45, and dossiercanada.ca is your first step into democracy!
If we want people to understand politics, it has to be brought down to their level.
When I first tried to take an interest in it, on top of not knowing the jargon, bills came as two lines… and fifty PDFs. Most people would simply walk away.
So I had an idea: use artificial intelligence first to read through all of it, then to put it in plain words. That's how DossierCanada was born.
Alongside the AI recap, I've given people a lexicon that explains the basics of political jargon. Plain-language law exists — think of this as its equivalent for politics!
The site's rules
Where what DossierCanada publishes comes from, and what it will not do
DossierCanada relies only on what an institution or a party has itself published, with a link to the original. And it says clearly what is missing.
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1No invented data
This is rule number one. If a piece of information is missing, or cannot be matched with certainty, the site says so (“not available”) instead of guessing. We do not fill in anything.
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2Primary sources only
We quote the institution or the party itself, never someone talking about it: LEGISinfo (Parliament of Canada) for bills; the House of Commons for MPs, votes, petitions and the sitting calendar; the Senate for senators and their votes; the Prime Minister's website for the Cabinet; the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying for declared lobbying; the platform published by the party for promises. One exception, which is a service and not a fact: finding your MP by postal code goes through Represent (OpenNorth), which links a postal code to a riding.
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3No news media
Nothing is taken from the press. Journalists' work is not ours to reuse, and information reported second-hand cannot be checked against a document. A promise made at a press conference but absent from the platform published by the party therefore does not appear on the site.
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4We never work around a protection
We never work around a CAPTCHA or an anti-bot protection. Our tools always identify themselves by name, DossierCanada, never as a browser. The House of Commons protects the bulk download of its petitions with a reCAPTCHA: we do not use it, we only read the public list its website shows to everyone. The file from the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying was closed to automated tools: we asked for permission, and the Office authorized our tool in September 2026.
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5Promises are quoted word for word
Every promise is an exact quote from the platform published by the party, in its own language: never translated, summarized or reworded by us. A script checks each quote back against the source page, and a quote that cannot be found word for word is not published. The sentence linking a promise to a bill is also copied from that bill's official summary. We do not use artificial intelligence to “find” promises: it invents them. Every card carries a “See the source” link.
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6No verdict
The site never says “promise kept” or “promise broken”, and it does not rate or judge anyone. It places the promise and the bills side by side, each with its source. The lobbying shown is what is declared in the official registry, without comment. You are the judge.
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7The official text always prevails
Plain-language summaries are generated by artificial intelligence from the official text of the bill as introduced, and are labelled as such: they may not reflect amendments adopted since. The link to the full text stays on every bill. If anything differs, the original document is the one that counts. The site is independent and has no official status.
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8We explain what is missing
When data is absent or incomplete, the page says so. A promise that leads to no bill is shown as such. Opposition parties are absent from the promises page, and the page says why: they do not control the legislative agenda. An absence on the site must never be read as silence from the institution or the party.
These rules apply everywhere on the site. See them at work on the promises page, and follow what changes in the site updates.
Parliament glossary
Parliamentary jargon, translated into everyday language.
Account and follows
Election promises
The governing party's commitments in the April 28, 2025 election, quoted word for word from its platform, beside the laws that followed. No verdict.
See the promises →