Methodology

Election Digest reads the whole campaign and keeps two kinds of claim — commitments (what a candidate will do) and stances (where they stand), each linked to its source. Everything else is removed. It does not recommend a candidate, and it does not score, rank, or compare.

commitment

What the publisher says it WILL do, support, fund, prevent, continue, or reverse. Requires explicit commitment language. A goal, preference, past action, or implied intention cannot be upgraded into a commitment.

stance

Explicit support, opposition, or preference concerning a defined municipal action or outcome, WITHOUT a promise to implement it. Merely naming a subject does not create a stance.

partisanship

attacks, adversarial comparison, accusations, rebuttals, partisan conflict

politicking

polling, fundraising, events, endorsements, strategy, viability, horse-race

pedigree

biography, credentials, career history, affiliations, awards, personal history

platitudes

identity appeals, slogans, values language, desired futures without a defined action

Aspirations — General values, desired futures, slogans, or topic mentions with no sufficiently defined municipal action or outcome — e.g. "a Vancouver where everyone can thrive". A sparse record is a valid result; do not pad it. — are not retained. Criticism is removed even when electorally significant; only an affirmative action that stands on its own survives.

Every retained claim is read — never scored — for how specifically it is developed. Each of twelve dimensions is noted in plain language as one of three states, always tied to an exact evidence passage. This is a description of the public record, never a grade, and it is never summed or ranked.

Only current material is published. A commitment or stance is current if it was published on or after 2026-01-01, or if the current campaign links, republishes, or adopts it. Prior-cycle material is kept as an internal record but never published as a current claim. Election day is 2026-10-17.

A candidate's or party's Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, and similar profiles are surfaced as links so you can check them yourself, but their contents are not extracted. Commitments and stances are read only from published web pages and documents that can be retrieved and quoted to an exact passage; social feeds, video, and audio are not. A candidate who campaigns mainly through social media or video will therefore show a sparse or empty record.

Each party's colour is a visual label only — a dot beside a name, a border, a header tint. It is never a ranking, a score, or an ideological signal, and colours are shown muted against the page so the meaningful colours (a source link, a stance) stay louder. Every hue is sampled from the party's own official website; a party with no single brand colour is shown in neutral grey, recorded as such. The full sourced set:

Colours sampled 2026-09-15 from the sites linked above. Municipal party branding is not a formal registry — where a logo is multi-colour, the dominant tone is used and noted. Sites may rebrand; the source and date make each colour re-checkable.