Filters
How to read the map ›
Watch where the sparks land. Federal news washes the whole country; provincial news lights one province; Québec keeps a rhythm of its own. When people arrive, the famine ships, the boat people, the Syrian winter, little figures walk in from the port and stay. The strip along the bottom counts the country, one figure for every million people. The little storefronts are the business openings and the domed halls are the community landmarks, the first synagogue, gurdwara and mosque among them: each carries its initial, appears the season it was founded, and never leaves; several in one city stack into a small main street. Tap one for its story. The small shapes are the doors themselves: the seaports, airports and land crossings people actually entered through, each shown only while it was open. Watch the door move west, and then into the sky: Grosse-Île and Pier 21 burn brightest in the age of steam; after the 1960s the glow shifts to the airports. Tap a door for its story, or any lit region to see what reached it. The bright flashes just happened. The faint warmth, and every settled figure, is everything that came before. The map is stylized and simplified, signals are about jurisdictions, not survey lines.
The ledger
Every signal the current era and filters allow. Tap one to jump the clock to it.
The coverage contract
Reliability is a promise with edges: each source below states exactly what it carries, and where the source’s structure allows it, completeness is proven, not assumed. If a source ever shows INCOMPLETE, that is the page telling on itself, which is the point.
Suggestions store the link and your note, nothing about you. A human reviews every suggested source before it joins the watch; the coverage contract only ever claims what a person has admitted.
The advertising contract
- Why ads exist
- This page is free. Sponsorships keep it free. Every sponsored unit is labelled Sponsored, styled apart from the signals, and served from this page itself, no ad network, no auction.
- Who may advertise
- Vetted sponsors from the newcomer economy, banking, credential evaluation, language testing, settlement services and the like. Never: anyone promising a guaranteed approval, an outcome for sale, or anything the signals themselves would report as a scam. An unsold slot shows the operator's own tools or a plain available card, never junk.
- What sponsors never touch
- The signals, the map, the coverage contract and its proofs. No sponsor sees, orders, edits or suppresses a signal. A sponsor unhappy with the news stays unhappy.
- Measurement
- Aggregate impression and click counts only, kept first-party. No cookies for advertisers, no trackers, no third-party requests, the privacy line in the footer survives the ads.
- How campaigns load
- From
data/ads.json(schema AHI_ADS_V1), advertiser, creative, slot, dates. The file is the ad server. - Advertise here
- Requests go to a review queue, every sponsor is vetted under this contract before anything runs.
What this is, honestly
- Lands and treaties
- The events on this map take place on lands First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples have inhabited since long before any of them. That includes territory covered by the numbered treaties, 1 through 11, by many treaties before and after them, and by regions no treaty covers. Indigenous peoples are not immigrants, and this page does not present their histories; those are documented by the nations themselves and at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. The map’s Treaties layer is limited, by the same editorial rule, to the treaties and agreements that governed settlement and newcomer arrival: from the Great Peace of Montréal (1701) to the 2021 amendment that added treaty observance to the citizenship oath. Classrooms can open the layer directly at ?view=land, where the numbered treaties appear at their signing places as the clock reaches them. One wording convention follows from the same facts: this page says first arrivals rather than first settlers for pre-Confederation newcomers, because the land was inhabited.
- What a signal is
- A dated event in Canadian immigration: statutes, regulations, programs and pilots, temporary public policies, court decisions, labour-market rules (ESDC · Job Bank · TFW), border and enforcement moments (CBSA), and the great arrivals themselves.
- Business & community layers
- Two curated historical layers, because the whole immigration picture is bigger than government decisions: businesses, many started by people who arrived first, from Molson and Eaton to Saputo, Magna, Linamar and Shopify; and community landmarks, the institutions communities built for themselves, from the first synagogue (Montréal, 1768) and first gurdwara (Vancouver, 1908) to the first mosque (Edmonton, 1938) and the great festivals. Dates come from company and community histories, not government sources, and both layers are colour-coded apart so they never blend into the official record. Nobody pays to appear here and nothing is sold on these layers; they exist to show the whole picture.
- Where the data lives
- A seed catalogue is built into this page, edition seed-001, written from general historical knowledge. Each entry names where to verify it. Entries whose verify line carries verified 2026-08-29 (the Express era, 2015 onward) or checked 2026-08-29 (the 2026 additions) have been confirmed against live official sources; the rest await the same pass before any client-facing use. This page is a viewer, not an authority.
- How apps rely on it
- The catalogue is one JSON file with schema
AHI_IMM_SIGNALS_V1. Put a maintained copy at
data/immigration-signals.jsonbeside this page and it merges with the seed at load (the seed wins on same-date collisions), one file any companion app can read. The feed is regenerated daily from official published sources, every Express Entry draw since 2015, the provincial registries, the news indexes. Each is named with its proof in the coverage contract above. - Population figures
- Census anchors 1851–2021 plus pre-Confederation estimates, linearly interpolated between anchors, approximate by design, for the counter and the one-figure-per-million strip. Verify against Statistics Canada before client-facing use. Walking figures are illustrative, not a count.
- The daily tier
- Signals carry a tier: era for history,
daily for draws, notices and day-to-day changes. Daily items play only when
"Daily items" is on (the This-year era turns it on for you). The built-in daily
entries are real draws, checked against live sources on 2026-08-29, the ongoing feed arrives through
data/immigration-signals.json, where each draw can carry its own details (invitations issued, score cutoffs, streams). - Ports of entry
- Fourteen historic and current doors, six seaports, four airports, four land crossings, with approximate opening and closing eras. Arrival figures are routed through the doors open in their era (sea before the mid-1950s, the airports after the jet age). Verify locations and eras against the CBSA directory and historical records before client-facing use.
- Storage & network
- Everything computes on your device; saved years and checked filters stay in this browser only. When hosted, the page reports one anonymous aggregate count per view and per sponsored-unit interaction: a number goes up; nothing about you (no identifier, no address, no cookie) is stored or sent.