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Clerk AI · grounded retrieval · EN / FR

Ask about Canadian policy. Get the record, not a guess.

Clerk reads Clarion's whole bilingual corpus — bills, Hansard, lobbying registrations and communications, tenders, funding, municipal agendas, the officials roster — and answers your question with the source rows cited inline. Every claim is a deep link to the record it came from.

  • Cites the primary record.
  • Federal → provincial → municipal.
  • Says so when coverage is thin.
  • English and French.
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Clerk · groundedExample answer

Who decides federal EV-charging funding, and who's already lobbying on it?

Federal charging dollars flow through NRCan's Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program1, so the decision sits with the department's senior officials and the minister's office. On the registry, Flo / AddÉnergie2 has logged active communications with NRCan on charging-station deployment — so the office-holder to brief is the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources3.

Provincial EV programs (e.g. Québec, B.C.) are covered separately — ask about a province to pull those rows.

Sources · deep-linked to the record
1
Funding program

Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP)

Natural Resources Canada · federal

Funds public and fleet charging-station deployment.

2
Lobbying registration

AddÉnergie Technologies (Flo) — active registration

Subject: charging infrastructure · Targets: NRCan, ISED

3 communication reports logged in the last quarter.

3
Official

Hon. Tim Hodgson — Minister, Energy and Natural Resources

tim.hodgson@parl.gc.ca · House of Commons

Responsible minister — from the officials roster, with contact.

Why GR teams trust it

An answer you can take into the room.

Most policy chatbots give you a confident paragraph and no way to check it. Clerk gives you the paragraph and the rows underneath it — so you can verify, quote, and act.

Provenance01

Cites the primary record, not “a source.”

Every claim carries a numbered chip that resolves to the actual row — the bill at its stage, the registration with its targets, the official with their email, the Hansard line with its date. Click through to the record in the app. Nothing is paraphrased into the void.

Cross-level02

One question, three orders of government.

Clerk synthesizes across federal, provincial, and municipal at once: a bill in Ottawa, a registration in B.C., and a council item in Toronto can all land in the same answer — because they all sit in one corpus, in both official languages.

Honesty03

It tells you when it doesn't know.

When the corpus is thin on a topic — a province with no clean lobbying feed, a file with no recent activity — Clerk says so and shows what it did find. It never invents a registration, a number, or a quote to fill the gap.

Bilingual04

Reads and answers in English and French.

The corpus is bilingual end to end — a French Hansard line and an English registration are equally retrievable. Ask in either language; cited records keep their original wording so you can quote them verbatim.

How it works

Retrieval first, then a grounded answer.

  1. 01

    Retrieve

    Your plain-language question runs keyword search across the whole corpus, plus semantic search that matches on meaning — a hybrid that catches both the exact phrase you typed and the related record you didn't.

  2. 02

    Ground

    The top source rows — bills, registrations, communications, tenders, funding, agendas, officials — are pulled in full and handed to the model as the only evidence it may use.

  3. 03

    Answer

    Clerk writes a short answer that cites those rows inline as [1][2][3], streaming token by token. Each citation deep-links to the record. No matching rows? It says so.

Key-optional by design: with an AI key, Clerk writes the synthesized summary above. With no key, it degrades to cited retrieval-only — it returns the ranked source rows it found, never a hallucinated summary. The provenance is always real.

Worked example · who to lobby

“Who should I be talking to on long-term care in Ontario?”

Clerk names the office-holder and the people already in the room — each with the record behind them.

The minister

Hon. Natalia Kusendova-Bashta

Minister of Long-Term Care, Ontario — pulled from the officials roster, with portfolio and contact.

Officials roster
Already lobbying

AdvantAge Ontario

Active registration on long-term-care funding, with logged communications naming the ministry contacts met.

Lobbying registry
The legislative hook

Bill on LTC staffing standards

The provincial bill at its current stage — so your brief lands against the live debate, not last session's.

Bills

Ontario doesn't publish its provincial lobbyist registry as a bulk feed — no tool ingests it cleanly. Clerk is upfront about that and still answers the question: the minister from the roster, the federal and municipal records that do exist, the bill at its stage. It points you to the right office rather than inventing a registration.

Stop screenshotting answers you can't cite.

Ask Clerk a question about Canadian policy and read the record underneath it. Free to start, in English and French.

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