Nothing on ChatYWG is drawn from an unnamed source. Each list below is a dataset we actually read, the body that publishes it, what we use it for, and how often it is revised. Where a figure appears on a page, the page names the source it came from.
Statistics Canada
The population and dwelling counts shown on each city reference page, taken at the census subdivision level for the city in question.
Statistics Canada
The year-by-year population estimates series back to 2001, used to show how each city has grown between censuses.
Environment and Climate Change Canada
The thirty-year temperature, rainfall, snowfall and sunshine averages published for each city, with the station identifiers used to read them.
Environment and Climate Change Canada
The current conditions and short forecast shown for each city, retrieved from the GeoMet API at request time.
Environment and Climate Change Canada
The current AQHI reading for each city and the official health-risk bands that explain what the number means.
Environment and Climate Change Canada
Active warnings and watches for each city, so a page can say when conditions are not ordinary.
Municipal governments
Each city's own published pages for waste, water, roads, snow, permits, bylaw matters and 311 contact routes. There is no single national index for these pages, so the exact address is recorded per city in our contacts source file; the link here leads to a national directory of municipal websites.
Provincial governments
The rules that apply at province level rather than city level — health insurance, driver licensing, tenancy, tax and statutory holidays — recorded per province in our provinces source file, with each claim pointing at the province’s own page.
OpenStreetMap contributors
The nearby-places search, which queries the Overpass API for amenities around a location.
The rules we follow when turning those datasets into pages. They describe what the pages are supposed to do, not what we would like them to do.
Every number we publish is read from the primary source — the census table, the climate normals station file, the agency observation feed, the municipality’s own page — rather than copied from a news article or an aggregator that has already summarised it.
When a figure or detail cannot be verified against a primary source we leave it out rather than estimating it, and where the gap matters we say on the page that the detail is not confirmed.
The identifiers needed to check a figure are published alongside it: climate and weather station IDs, Statistics Canada table numbers, census subdivision codes, and the address of the page the value was read from.
Facts that change often — fares, fees, opening hours and program rules — are linked to the live official page instead of being frozen into our text, so what you read is the current version and not a snapshot of the day we wrote it.
Municipal and provincial details are recorded per city and per province in our own source files, each with the date it was last checked, so we can say when a claim was verified and against what.
At least two substantial guides must exist for a city before any advertising is served on that city, and ads never appear on the assistant, on policy pages, or on any page that does not carry substantial original content.
Corrections are published rather than made silently: when we fix a factual error we record the date, the page affected, what was wrong and what it now says, and that log stays public.
Where our own judgement or commentary goes beyond what the sources state, we label it as ours, and we do not accept payment, gifts or affiliate commission in exchange for coverage.