CPAC Archive of Canadian Political Speech

The Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) has made a significant archive of videos available online. A consortium of for-profit cable companies, CPAC provides free, not-for-profit video coverage of the daily grind of federal political and legal life in Canada, filming Parliamentary debates, commission hearings, and Supreme Court hearings.

At the moment it’s not possible to know the exact scope of the archive — at least, I couldn’t find much in the way of precise explanatory material about dates and coverage. The viewer can choose to enter the archive via one of a number of tabs: Latest, House, Senate, By Show, Special. There’s a search box that works less than perfectly, with no advanced search function available and no indication of whether Boolean searching works. It appears that it searches within a chosen tab and not across tabs. It’s also unclear whether it searches metadata only or transcriptions of speech as well, though the former is more likely, alas.

Needless to say this is a valuable resource, one that a modern country should provide and foster (probably as a governmental, rather than as a market, function). The archive needs to be clarified, however, and made much easier to use. Indeed, there’s little excuse for such a poor interface when examples abound of good government data sites from around the world.