Civic life works better when citizens can read the record. Not summaries written by partisans. Not highlights chosen by editors. The actual record — who said what, when, and in response to whom.
That record exists. It's called Hansard. It's public, it's exhaustive, and it's nearly impossible to use. Thousands of pages per session, hundreds of hours of tedious video, inconsistently indexed, impossible to search across time. They work for you. Here's what they've been up to.
Peanut Gallery reads it — and makes it searchable, attributed, and verifiable by anyone. Not to tell you what to think. To make sure you can find out what was said.
Project Status
Consider this a beta. A very public, very imperfect beta. Coverage is selective, some things are missing, and large parts of what we want to build don't exist yet. We publish what we have because an imperfect record is better than no record — and because we want to know what you think before we build more. Coverage and methodology details in each publication.
Publications
Vancouver
Vancouver City Council — meetings, officials, and motions. Every session summarised and attributed. Searchable by councillor, topic, and date.
FQPPI Federal Question Period Productivity Index
A rigorous, bilingual accounting of what Canada's Parliament actually does during Question Period. Searchable by MP, party, and date. Draw your own conclusions.
How it works
Official transcripts and meeting records are fetched, parsed, and run through an AI summarisation pipeline that builds a hierarchy of summaries — from a single attributed remark up to a politician's full-year record. Every summary links down to the one below it. At the bottom of every chain is the original source: unedited, timestamped, public.
This project uses large language models to do a job no human team could afford to do: read every session, attribute every remark, and build a searchable record of political speech in real time. LLMs make mistakes. So does leaving the record unread. Every summary links to its source so you can check the work.
How to Help
Tell us what you think
Peanut Gallery is an experiment and experiments need feedback. Who are you? How might you use this? What do you want covered? What are we missing? We want to hear it.
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