Current location:	Quebec, QC, Canada
Entry tags:	canada, canadianmpdata, copyright, parliament, politics, public+domain

Canadian MP data
I wonder if the government is going to sue me for copyright infringement. As they say on the website I got the information from:

The material on this site is covered by the provisions of the Copyright Act and related regulations and international agreements. Such provisions serve to identify the information source and, in specific instances, to prohibit reproduction of materials without written permission.

The visitor should be aware that some of the material found on this site might be subject to copyright held by third parties.

It is the sole responsibility of the visitor to determine the copyright of the content and to obtain all necessary permissions.

If publishing the list of MPs with their contact information is somehow illegal, we're definitely not living in a democracy. I didn't ask permission because I don't think I should have to.

Make Poverty History had a campaign asking people to call their MP. Sadly, the email did not include the MP's phone number - even though they know who the MP is. There was no public database they knew of that had a list of MPs with their corresponding data. Through civicaccess.ca I heard of other organizations and similar cases, so I decided I would compile the information. That database now exists, and is in the public domain (as long as I don't sued!):

http://lokobo.com:3000/mps

download a CSV version at http://lokobo.com:3000/mps.csv

The source code for retrieving the information and the website is also public domain:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/mp-ca-scraper/

(Geeks don't copy and paste information from websites into spreadsheets. Oh, no! We take twice the time, and use programming tools. And publish the whole thing as open source.)

(Comments deleted because of a deluge of spam. Project is offline, code is still up for anyone that wants to take it over. Let me know in private if you do, I'll update this post)