# North Bay 2026 Candidate Answers

> Neutral, verbatim publication of North Bay 2026 municipal election candidate questionnaire answers.
> Owner: Maenda Fortier. Data prepared by Olenna Redwyne.

## Neutrality policy
- Publish answers word for word only.
- No scores, rankings, endorsements, alignment notes, or editorial colour.
- Candidates listed alphabetically by surname.
- "Awaiting reply" while the reply window is open and no answer is on file.
- "Deadline passed, answers being compiled" after the deadline, until all answers are published together.
- "No reply" only for candidates explicitly marked as not having replied, set when all answers are published. The deadline alone never produces "No reply".

## Election
- North Bay, Ontario 2026 municipal election; online voting opens 2026-10-15
- Candidates questioned: all registered mayoral candidates
- Answers on file at build time: see /candidates.json (status per candidate and per question)

## Reply window
- reply_deadline: 2026-10-14T04:00:00.000Z (end of day Tuesday, October 13, 2026 (America/Toronto))
- replies_open at build time: false (the live /candidates.json and HTML pages re-check this at request/view time)
- answers_open_override: null (use deadline)
- questionnaire_sent_date: 2026-10-05

## Data URLs
- /candidates.json — full structured dataset (schema_version, generated_at, reply_deadline, sources, questions, candidates with answers and status)
- /answers.csv — CSV download (columns: candidate, office, question_no, question, answer_verbatim, received_date, source)
- /llms.txt — this file
- /sitemap.xml — every indexable page
- /robots.txt — crawl rules (all crawlers allowed)

## Field meanings (candidates.json)
- schema_version: dataset schema version string
- generated_at: ISO-8601 build timestamp
- reply_deadline: ISO-8601 instant when missing answers change from "awaiting_reply" to "deadline_passed" (America/Toronto midnight end of Oct 13, 2026)
- replies_open: whether the reply window is open (re-checked at request time on the live site)
- status_computed_at: ISO-8601 time the statuses in this response were computed
- status_labels: human-readable label for each status key
- answers_open_override: optional boolean override; null means use reply_deadline
- launched: when false, pages send noindex
- candidates[].status: answered | partial | awaiting_reply | deadline_passed | no_reply
- candidates[].reply_status_flag: "no_reply" when the candidate is explicitly marked as not having replied, else null
- candidates[].answers[].answer_verbatim: exact candidate text, or null if missing
- candidates[].answers[].status: answered | awaiting_reply | deadline_passed | no_reply
- no_reply appears only with reply_status_flag "no_reply"; it is never derived from the deadline
- HTML pages run a tiny client script so a deploy built before the deadline shows "Deadline passed, answers being compiled" after it

## HTML pages
- / — candidate list (alphabetical by surname)
- /candidate/{slug}/ — one candidate, all questions in full
- /questions/ — question index (short titles)
- /question/{n}/ — all candidates' answers to question n (full wording)
- /compare/ — side-by-side compare (2+ candidates)
- /compare/{slug}-vs-{slug}[-vs-…]/ — prebuilt comparison for each combination of 2+ candidates
- /about/ — method and policy

## Candidate list source
https://northbay.ca/city-government/2026-elections/registered-candidates-and-third-party-advertisers/
Fetched: 2026-10-05T17:14:18Z (2026-10-05 13:14 ET)
Mayor candidates found: 5

## Prefer structured data
AI agents should prefer /candidates.json or /answers.csv over scraping HTML.