Masthead
About Branch
An independent, non-partisan record of Canadian politics. Built for the generation that lost its news feed.
Why Branch exists
In June 2023, Meta blocked Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram in response to Bill C-18. Overnight, millions of young Canadians lost a key tool in their political understanding.
Branch is a small attempt to fill that gap. A registry, not a feed. Politicians, parties, bills, and issues. Laid out without jargon, updated from public sources, with no algorithm deciding what you see.
What you can do here
Find your MP
Enter your postal code to see who represents you federally, provincially, and municipally. With their voting record and contact details.
Track bills
Every bill in the 45th Parliament with a short summary, status tracker, and links back to the official Parliament source.
Compare parties
Side-by-side party positions on the issues that drove turnout in the last election. Housing, climate, healthcare, and more.
Follow politicians and bills
A short, focused queue of the people and legislation you care about. Updates show up when something actually happens. Not on a schedule.
Our principles
- Non-partisan
- We don't endorse parties or candidates. We present facts and let readers draw their own conclusions.
- No jargon
- Government jargon translated into clear English and French. If we have to use a technical term, we define it.
- Public data only
- Every fact in Branch traces back to a primary source: Parliament of Canada, Elections Canada, Open North, or a provincial legislature.
- Privacy first
- No tracking pixels. No advertising. No selling your data. Your postal code stays on your device for lookups; we only store what you ask us to.
- Bilingual by design
- English and French, with equal care. Not machine-translated. Both languages are written and reviewed.
Built in the open
Civic infrastructure should be inspectable. Branch's source code lives on GitHub. If something looks wrong, the corrections desk is one click away.
What we cover today
Branch's current dataset includes 250 politicians (federal cabinet, party leaders, provincial premiers, opposition leaders, and the mayors of Canada's eight largest cities), 665 bills from the 44th and 45th Parliaments (every government bill plus Senate public bills and Private Member's Bills that reached royal assent), 25 parties (six federal, sixteen provincial, three territorial), and 30 issue files covering housing, health care, climate, Indigenous reconciliation, immigration, cost of living, and more.
Coverage expands one verified row at a time. Each politician has a bio in English and French, every bill carries a status timeline back to first reading, and each issue page lists which bills speak to that issue and how the major parties have positioned themselves.
Sources we read
Every Branch row carries a source URL back to its origin. The primary sources we consult:
LEGISinfo and the Parliament of Canada
Bill text, royal assent dates, vote splits in the House and Senate, committee reports, and statutory citations in the S.C. YYYY, c. N format.
Elections Canada
Riding boundaries, registered party lists, candidate financial returns, official election results back to 2021, and the Canada Elections Act.
Provincial and territorial legislatures
Bill status, MLA, MPP, MNA, and MHA biographies, cabinet appointments, and provincial Hansard across thirteen jurisdictions.
Supreme Court of Canada
Constitutional rulings cited in our issue files, including R. v. Sharma, Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, R. v. Bissonnette, and the Saskatchewan First Act reference.
Statistics Canada
Population, demographic, housing-completion, labour-market, and consumer-price data cited in issue summaries.