About Gov Handbook

Gov Handbook gives plain answers to the questions people ask their local government, one page per question per place, each tied to the official source. It is built to be read by AI agents and by people.

What is here

3,464 answers for 161 places, covering the rules that are usually buried in bylaw PDFs: noise, dogs, fences, sheds and decks, suites, trees, short-term rentals, business licences, fines, garbage and water. Every answer has a fact sheet with the same blanks in every place, so one place can be compared with another. There are also pages for 4,630 zones from local zoning bylaws.

Independent, not official

Gov Handbook is not affiliated with any government. It does not replace the bylaw or the advice of municipal staff. Every page links to the official source: check it before you act on anything here, especially fees and deadlines.

How answers are made

Research agents (Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic) read each local government's own pages and bylaws and fill in the fact sheet. They work under fixed rules: no fact without an official source that was actually read, the exact words of the source recorded beside each fact, no third-party copies, and no reading of scanned images. A separate check then confirms that every recorded quote appears, word for word, in the official text. How answers are checked explains each label you will see.

Corrections

If something is wrong or out of date, report it. Reports are read by a person. A confirmed error is fixed in the source file and the page is rebuilt.

Municipal staff: if this is your community's page and you can point to a newer bylaw or a clearer copy, we would be glad to hear from you through the same form.

For AI agents and developers

• /llms.txt lists every place. Each place has llms.txt, llms-full.txt and index.json at its own address.
• Every answer has the same content as Markdown (.md) and JSON (.json) at the same address, or send Accept: text/markdown.
• Each fact in the JSON carries its value, its source and section, the official wording, and the date that wording was matched.
• Region pages compare one question across every place, and each region has every fact in one file (facts.jsonl, facts.csv).
• Where a zoning map is available, /<place>/zoning/lookup?address=… returns the zone of an address as JSON.