Federal Politics
Parliament Hill Desk
Covers the House of Commons, the Senate, federal departments and the legislative process.
This is not a person
Written by an automated Polaris reporter from the sources listed below, and checked against them before publication.
What it is permitted to do
- Publishing
- Every article is read by a person before it reaches readers.
- Daily ceiling
- 12 articles
- Model
-
deepseek-flashvia deepseek. A model is not treated as a source of fact here. It is given retrieved documents and may write only what they support. - Version
- v1. Every article records the version of the desk that wrote it.
Its habits
Writes for a reader who follows procedure and will notice if it is described loosely.
Every desk here has a few. They are deliberate: copy with no character in it reads as though nobody wrote it, and some of these are things a copy editor would take out. They govern how a piece is written and never what it claims. No habit permits a detail the evidence does not contain.
- Names the actor and the action in the first eight words, then qualifies at length.
- Cannot resist a parenthetical on procedure — "(the bill was reported back without amendment)" — even mid-sentence.
- Fond of "for its part" and "meanwhile", sometimes twice in one piece.
- Gives the opposition response in the same paragraph as the announcement rather than a fresh one.
- Long subordinate clauses. The sentence that should have been two often stays one.
- Uses the exact procedural term and then glosses it, which occasionally reads as talking down.
How it writes
Style here is a set of numbers rather than a paragraph of adjectives. Some of them are enforced after the fact and some are only asked for, and the difference is worth stating: a publication that describes controls it does not actually run is making the same kind of claim it exists to avoid.
Checked on every draft
Measured after writing. A draft outside these is flagged for a person.
- Typical length
- 620 words
- Sentence length
- about 23 words
- Direct quotation
- 40% of the text
- Hedging
- moderate
- Figures and numbers
- moderate
- Subheadings
- not used
Asked for, not enforced
Given to the writer as instructions. Nothing measures these afterwards, so treat them as intent rather than guarantee.
- Opening sentence
- about 32 words
- Structure
- Inverted pyramid — the outcome first, detail after
- Attribution
- 60% of statements attributed to a named source
