What's New

September 2026

1. 25 September 2026Correction

   Reworked the games: one proper daily puzzle instead of three

   Higher or Lower and How Far? are gone — they felt like spreadsheets with a score counter, and that is what they were. They are replaced by City of the Day, a deduction game in the style of Globle: a mystery Canadian city, six guesses, each guess returning distance, direction and a population hint, with a shareable result. The Daily Five stays as the local-knowledge quiz. The mystery city draws on ~120 Canadian municipalities of 60,000+ people with representative coordinates from OpenStreetMap (Open Database Licence).

2. 25 September 2026Feature

   Added the first home-services pages (Calgary)

   The commercial layer is live in scaffold form: a home-services hub and eight service pages for Calgary — furnace installation and repair, plumbing, water heaters, roofing, movers, snow removal, electricians — each with a cost table, hiring advice, an FAQ and a quote-request form. Cost figures are placeholders and are marked unverified until confirmed against real local quotes. Lead submissions are validated, honeypotted, rate-limited and delivered by email until a database is connected.

3. 25 September 2026Feature

   Added three daily games

   Higher or Lower, The Daily Five and How Far? are now published for every city. Each is generated fresh each day from the same sourced datasets as the reference pages, so a puzzle can never ask something the site cannot answer. No account, no leaderboard, no tracking: streaks are kept in your own browser.

4. 25 September 2026Feature

   Added "Today in your city"

   A daily briefing that changes as the day does: current conditions and forecast from Environment Canada, the Air Quality Health Index, sunrise and sunset with the change since yesterday, and whether today is a statutory holiday. Every figure is fetched or computed rather than written, and the page deliberately carries no advertising.

5. 25 September 2026Correction

   Expanded the advertising disclosure in the privacy policy

   The policy now states, in the terms Google requires, that third-party vendors including Google use cookies to serve ads based on prior visits, that this enables ads based on visits to this and other sites, and how to opt out through Google Ads Settings, aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.eu.

6. 24 September 2026Content

   Expanded the guide library

   Thirty new guides were published, taking the library from thirty-one to sixty-one — six or seven for every city. They cover how local systems actually work — transit fares and fare cards, waste and recycling streams, property assessment and tax, snow clearing and winter parking, utilities, and how each city is governed. Every guide cites the official pages it was written from, and none of them states a fare, fee, fine or deadline as a fixed number: those are linked to the live official page instead.

7. 24 September 2026Feature

   The assistant now answers from our own sourced data

   The lookup assistant is given the same Statistics Canada, Environment Canada and municipal figures that the reference pages publish, and is told to prefer them over its own recall. Asked for a city’s population it now answers from the census rather than saying it has no figure.

8. 24 September 2026Correction

   Removed the venue directories from the assistant

   Lists of rooftop bars, speakeasies and nightclubs were withdrawn from the assistant. They carried descriptions, entrances, hours and booking links with no source behind them, and the assistant was repeating them as fact. It now says we hold no verified venue details and points to the venue itself.

9. 24 September 2026Correction

   Withdrew unverifiable city trivia

   Several cities carried a trivia line that could not be checked against any source — a claimed number of sunny days, a “windiest intersection in Canada”, a claim about bars per square foot. Nothing rendered them, and they have been deleted rather than left to be reused later.

10. 24 September 2026Feature

    The city switcher now moves between the city sites

    Choosing another city previously changed the interface without leaving the domain you were on. It is now a real link to that city’s own site.

11. 24 September 2026Content

    Added the city reference section

    Ten sourced reference pages were published for each city, covering population, climate, air quality, transit, city services, emergency numbers, health care, settling in, driving and statutory holidays. Each page names the official source behind its figures.

12. 24 September 2026Data

    Live air quality added

    The Air Quality Health Index from Environment and Climate Change Canada is now shown for each city, together with the official health-risk bands and the advice that goes with each band.

13. 24 September 2026Data

    Climate normals published

    Thirty-year Environment and Climate Change Canada climate normals are published for each city, including monthly temperature, rainfall, snowfall and sunshine, with the station identifiers used.

14. 24 September 2026Data

    Census and population estimates published

    Statistics Canada 2021 Census figures and the annual population estimates series back to 2001 are published for each city, with the census subdivision and table identifiers needed to check them.

15. 24 September 2026Correction

    Removed unverifiable venue details

    Star ratings, review counts, prices, availability and booking times that had no source were removed from the local data used by the assistant. Where a detail cannot be verified, the assistant now says so and points to the venue instead of stating a figure.

16. 24 September 2026Correction

    Corrected St. John's 311 information

    An earlier guide stated that St. John's has no 311 service. It does: Access St. John's is reached by dialling 311. Victoria is the city in this network that genuinely has no 311 line, and that is now stated separately on Victoria's page.

17. 24 September 2026Correction

    Removed a Calgary phone number shown to other cities

    A hardcoded Calgary 311 number had been appearing in answers for every city. Each city now shows only its own verified number, and the Calgary number is labelled as the out-of-city line.

18. 24 September 2026Feature

    One canonical address per page

    Pages were reachable at two different URLs, one with the city prefix and one without. The prefixed form now redirects permanently to the canonical address, so there is a single published URL for each page.

19. 24 September 2026Feature

    Added weather and local figures to the home page

    The home page now shows current conditions from Environment and Climate Change Canada, verified civic phone numbers, and links to each municipality’s own service pages.