# govanswers

> Canada's municipal bylaws and policies, consolidated and verified. One page
> per (municipality x topic) answering the questions residents ask — quiet
> hours, dog licensing, burn permits, short-term rentals, zoning, AI use
> policies — with every fact traced to a captured copy of the official
> document. Verified negatives included: "this municipality has no AI policy
> as of <date>" is an answer, with the date it was checked.

Currently covering 165 municipalities with 730
verified bylaws. Data is produced by the GovIndex pipeline: discovered by
search, verified against the opened source document, re-checked periodically.
Negative results are first-class: a municipality page may state that no bylaws
are published online, verified as of a given date.

Base URL: https://govanswers.org

## URL scheme

Examples (province codes are two-letter postal: pe, ns, yt, nt, nu):
- https://govanswers.org/ca/pe/stratford/noise/          (answer page, HTML)
- https://govanswers.org/ca/pe/stratford/noise.json      (same data, JSON)
- https://govanswers.org/ca/ns.json                      (province index: all covered municipalities + slugs)


- `/ca/<province>/<municipality>/` — all topics for one municipality
- `/ca/<province>/<municipality>/<topic>/` — the answer page (HTML)
- `/ca/<province>/<municipality>/<topic>.json` — the same data, machine-readable
- `/topics/<topic>/` — one topic across every covered municipality
- `/sitemap.xml` — every page with last-verified dates

Bylaw topics: noise, animal-control, short-term-rentals, open-burning, zoning, parking-snow, property-maintenance, atv-snowmobile, fireworks, water-sewer
Policy topics: procurement, grants, facility-use, winter-services, hr-personnel, privacy-records, communications, emergency-management, finance-policy, technology, conduct-ethics, ai-policy

## Key pages

- [Prince Edward Island](https://govanswers.org/ca/pe/): 59 municipalities, 31 with verified bylaws
- [Nova Scotia](https://govanswers.org/ca/ns/): 49 municipalities, 49 with verified bylaws
- [Yukon](https://govanswers.org/ca/yt/): 8 municipalities, 8 with verified bylaws
- [Northwest Territories](https://govanswers.org/ca/nt/): 24 municipalities, 12 with verified bylaws
- [Nunavut](https://govanswers.org/ca/nu/): 25 municipalities, 24 with verified bylaws

## Notes for agents

- JSON twins carry document titles, bylaw numbers, adoption dates, summaries,
  source URLs, and sha256 snapshot hashes.
- "adopted bylaw" entries were opened and verified; other entries are
  supporting material (news, agendas, unconfirmed leads) and are labelled.
- This is an unofficial consolidation; the official version of any bylaw is
  held by the municipal clerk.