Official sources first. Uncertainty stays visible.

Source hierarchy

1. Municipal building, planning, development and permit departments.
2. Provincial, territorial or delegated safety-code authorities where they control an approval.
3. Official forms, bylaws, fee schedules and application portals.
4. Secondary sources can help discovery but do not control a local permit claim.

What earns a local claim

A city-specific requirement, exemption, fee or timeline is published only when it can be traced to an official source. If a rule is conditional, the condition stays visible rather than being flattened into a universal answer.

What happens when research is incomplete

The city remains searchable, but its source-only hub stays noindex,follow and out of the XML sitemap until substantial local facts have been extracted. This is deliberate: we would rather publish less than fill a page with generic city-swapped copy.

Starting-city methodology

V1 starts with the 100 largest Canadian municipalities / municipal equivalents by 2021 Census population. Population is a coverage-priority input only; it is not displayed as filler on local permit pages.

Reference list used to assemble the starting 100 municipalities ↗