And now for something a little different: an example where the information being provided in an article actually isn’t available online (at least at the time of publication). Here is an article from the CBC discussing various government agencies and their history of blocking or deleting posts on various social media, information provided by the government in response to questions posed by Members of Parliament* during routine proceedings. As part of the article, it provides a number of statistics, as well as a handy charge with source attribution to “Documents tabled in the House of Commons”.
This last part is key, since if you want to find out about anything that happened on a day the House or Senate sat, you go to the handy Parliament website, which includes not only the Order & Notice Paper for the Day, but also any documents tabled or debates recorded via Hansard. However, if you were to navigate to today’s session, you would notice that the Journal & Hansard sections aren’t updated…because they’re currently still live. It’s thus perfectly reasonable to not expect supporting information or sources to be provided to the reader.
* With that being said, the questions by Members are Parliament are available, as there is some turnaround time inherent to responding to questions by MPs, and can be found here & here:
Mr. Nater (Perth—Wellington) — With regard to the deletion of social media posts on government websites, since January 1, 2016, and broken down by department, agency, crown corporation, or other government entity: (a) how many posts were deleted; and (b) what was the reason for each deletion in (a)?
Mr. Obhrai (Calgary Forest Lawn) — With regard to social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, and others, operated by departments, agencies, crown corporations, other government entities, including Ministerial accounts, since November 4, 2015, and broken down by account and by incident: (a) how many individuals were blocked; (b) what was the reason for each account being blocked; (c) what was the handle or name of each account which was blocked; and (d) what is the policy as it relates to blocking accounts?