METHOD

What counts as good news, and how we decide.

Good News Canada is a spin-off of Order Paper, the public-record platform. This site reads the same public record and surfaces its constructive side.

1. What counts as good news

An item qualifies when the record itself is constructive: new or renewed funding and grants, health and science data, community services, environmental protection, innovation, honours, and Canada’s work abroad. We do not cheerlead events; we show records. A funding guideline, a water-quality dataset and a museum catalogue are each good news in this sense: they are public, current and useful.

2. How items are classified

Every edition starts from records in the last 90 days in the datahub feed — Canadian open-data portals (open.canada.ca, and the Ontario, Québec, Alberta and Toronto portals) plus the Canada Gazette. Titles (and dataset tags) are scored with keyword rules for six categories: Economy & Jobs, Science & Health, Communities, Environment, Innovation, and Canada in the World. Administrative noise — expense disclosures, tax schedules, hunting seasons, compliance registers — is scored down and excluded.

This edition was screened twice: keyword rules first, then Hermes 4 14B (a small open model running locally on Ollama) read the borderline titles as a second reader. The model never writes the site: it only helps decide which borderline items pass. This honest-AI note is updated by the build script each time it runs.

3. Every item is cited

Each card links to its source record when the row carries a URL, otherwise to the portal that published it. Data comes from Canadian open-government sources under licences such as the Open Government Licence — Canada (OGL-C). We hold no item we cannot cite.

4. What we will not publish

No fabricated facts: we never describe events the cited record does not support. No personal data. We do not label opinion as news, and we flag when a machine contributed to screening. If an item misstates its record, we correct it publicly.

5. Corrections policy

If you find an item that misstates or mislabels its source record, tell the maintainer (Order Paper) and a correction note is appended to the item on the next build — appended, never silently edited away. Positive news that cannot stand correction is propaganda; this site is built to be corrected.

v0.1.0 Sep 2, 2026 Made in Canada