Where our information comes from
Every claim on this site carries its own sources. This is the layer above that: the standing list of places a scan opens before it goes searching, so that finding the right document is a routine rather than a piece of luck. It exists because it wasn't one — the single most useful source we have, the City's own council recaps, was found by accident on a general web search.
A starting point is not a coverage claim. Working this list is not the same as having searched, and a source being on it does not mean it was opened on any particular day. What each scan actually checked is recorded, dated, in the repository.
Checked on every scan
The official record. These are opened every time, whatever the subject — because the run that skips one and finds nothing cannot tell the difference between an empty source and an unopened one.
Checked when the subject matches
Opened when an issue turns on what they hold — a bill, a tribunal appeal, a planning application, the Peel transition.
- Legislative Assembly of Ontario — bills
Bills before the Ontario legislature, and what stage each has reached — introduced, passed, or in force. - Ontario e-Laws — consolidated statutes AND regulations
The consolidated text of Ontario statutes and regulations as they currently stand, which is not always what a bill said when it was passed — a law can be amended years later, and the consolidated version is the one in force. - Peel Region — service transfer / transition
Peel Region's own updates on transferring services to Mississauga — the mechanics behind a decade-long change. - escribe — council minutes and agenda documents
Council and committee minutes and agenda documents — the full record sitting behind a summary. - Ontario Land Tribunal
The Ontario Land Tribunal, where planning refusals and approvals get appealed and sometimes overturned. - City development applications
Development applications filed with the City, and how far along each one is. - Committee of Adjustment decisions
Minor variance and consent decisions — the smaller planning calls that never reach a Council vote. - Environment Registry of Ontario (ERO)
Ontario's public register of environmentally significant proposals and decisions — the permits and approvals a project needs, and the periods when the public can comment on them. - Infrastructure Ontario — public-work Class Environmental Assessment
Infrastructure Ontario's Class Environmental Assessment page — the process the province follows before building on government property, including the public review window and the right to ask the Minister to escalate a review. The per-project reports are not published here; this page is the rulebook and the project list. - City of Mississauga — Open Data portal
The City's open-data portal — the maps and datasets behind things like storm sewers, tree cover and natural areas, published by the City for anyone to download.
Watch Council yourself — Council meetings are public and the City streams them live. Nothing on this page is a substitute for watching one — what Council actually decided can be seen and heard at the meeting itself.
News coverage
Used for the one thing the official record cannot supply: what a person actually said. Never used as the authority for a date or a count.
What we cannot read
Some of the record is public in the sense that a person may read it, and closed in the sense that this site cannot. Where that happens we say so rather than let the gap read as nothing to report.
The one that should bother a reader most is mississauga.com — Metroland, the local paper. Its terms disallow automated reading, so the coverage closest to home is the coverage we are least able to use. That is not a complaint; it is a bias in what we can see, and a reader can only discount for a bias they have been told about.
The clearest case is in our own output: of the 73 candidates we link to, 7 — 10% — have no campaign website, and give at least one account on a platform this site cannot read. We publish the address and then cannot follow it. Nobody chose that; it is what happens when candidates are asked where to be found and name the platform they actually use. But it means a candidate's own words can sit one click from this page and never reach it.
You can read what we can't
Every link above works perfectly well in your browser. The block is on automated reading, not on people — which means the gap between what is public and what this site can see is a gap a person can close.
The Feedback link in the menu opens an email that already contains the page you were on and a line reading "Source, if you have one:". That line is for exactly this: paste the address of the thing we could not reach — a Facebook post, a Metroland article, a document behind a challenge page — and say what it shows.
Being straight about what happens next. A link we still cannot open does not become a confirmed fact because a reader sent it. What it does is tell us where to look, and give us a date and a name to look for in the records we can read — which is usually enough to find the thing properly. If it can only ever rest on the pasted link, it gets a low confidence rating saying so, or it does not go up. That is slower than you might like, and it is the only version of this that is worth trusting.
Why publish this
A site that makes claims about named candidates during an election is asking to be trusted. The usual way to earn that is to say you are careful. This is the other way: show the reader where you looked, and where you couldn't.
Neither list flatters us, and that is the point of printing them together. The first says what a routine scan reaches; the second says what it never will. A source we cannot open is not a subject nobody cared about — but on a page it looks like one, and only naming the difference lets a reader tell them apart.
None of this is specific to Mississauga. Records that are public but unreadable, a local paper that machines may not read, platforms that answer a request without answering the question — these would shape what any citizen site in any city could see. The list would differ; the shape of the problem would not.