How AI agents follow Canadian federal announcements
An agent follows Canadian federal activity by calling a wire that reads the Government of Canada news feed at runtime. It returns departmental announcements, funding decisions and ministerial statements with dates and links. Two boundaries matter: it is English only, and it is federal only.
/mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.
Both of those boundaries are invisible in the results, which is exactly why an agent has to be told about them rather than left to infer.
Federal only, in a country where that excludes a lot
Canada is a federation, and the division of powers puts several of the subjects people most often ask about outside federal jurisdiction. Health care delivery, education and most natural resource management are provincial. Each province and territory runs its own newsroom, and none of them are in this feed.
So an agent asked "what did Canada announce about hospital funding" can return a federal transfer announcement while the actual decision it was asked about was made in Toronto or Quebec City. The honest output names the level of government it searched.
| Question | In this wire? | Where it actually lives |
|---|---|---|
| Federal department or agency announcement | Yes | This wire |
| Federal funding into a province or region | Yes | This wire |
| Provincial health, education or licensing | No | Provincial newsroom |
| Court judgments | No | Court and tribunal publishers |
English only, in a country that publishes in two languages
The Government of Canada publishes its communications in both official languages, and this wire reads the English feed. That has a specific consequence for keyword search: a French search term will not match, and a release whose English version is worded differently from its French one will rank differently.
For an agent this is a routing rule rather than a limitation to apologise for. Query in English, and if the user asked in French, say that the English communications stream was what was searched. Presenting an English-only result set as the complete government record is the overclaim to avoid.
The same shape of question for other jurisdictions is handled on separate wires: how agents track UK government announcements and court judgments covers GOV.UK and Find Case Law, and how agents follow European Commission decisions covers the EU institutions.
High volume, short window, entity-first queries
Two measured properties shape how to query it. A live poll returned 62 items inside the window, and the retention window here is 7 days, which is shorter than most government wires on this service.
That combination means:
- Filter with
qon names, not topics. The feed is whole-of-government, so
it carries regional development agencies, parks, fisheries and skills funding alongside anything with national reach. A broad word like "investment" returns a wall of regional announcements.
- Do not widen past the window and expect more. Seven days is the whole
corpus. Anything older has been evicted, and a query for last month's announcement returns nothing regardless of how it is phrased.
# discovery only, no items: browse every wire, its filters and its price claude mcp add --transport http botwire https://thebotwire.com/mcp # paid, $0.005: a department, agency or file, full window curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/canada/latest?q=fisheries&since=7d&limit=25" # everything federal in the last two days curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/canada/latest?since=48h&limit=50"
Parameters are q, since and limit (1 to 50). One publisher sits behind this wire, so the src filter takes a single value and does no useful work. The call costs $0.005 in USDC on Base, with no API key, no signup and no subscription. Every route, filter and price is machine-readable at /llms-full.txt.
FAQ
Does this wire include Bank of Canada announcements?
Not through this route. Central bank communications sit on a separate wire alongside other non-Fed central banks, because a rate decision is a different class of document from a departmental news release and gets asked about by different agents. Routing each to its own wire is what keeps a monetary policy question from returning a parks announcement.
Can an agent get French-language releases?
Not from this wire, which reads the English feed. The Government of Canada publishes in both official languages, so the French equivalent generally exists at the source. An agent working in French should say that it searched the English stream, rather than reporting an absence it did not actually test.
How far back does the window go?
Seven days, with a 7 day default lookback, so the default and the retention are the same here. That is deliberate on a high-volume daily source: a longer window would return hundreds of items per query and cost more tokens to read than the answer is worth.
How fresh is the Canada wire?
It is polled at most every 15 minutes, which sits inside the publishing rhythm of a source that posts throughout the working day. The observed ingest interval across the service and the last poll timestamp are published live at /health, and a cadence claim that contradicted that endpoint would be wrong by definition.
Sources
Government of Canada news releases are published through the government's own news service, which this wire reads at api.io.canada.ca, the English-language endpoint of a bilingual publication stream. Poll cadence and per-call pricing for this service are published live at thebotwire.com/health.
Related: How do AI agents track UK government announcements and court judgments? · How do AI agents follow European Commission decisions?