Illustrations

Every likeness on the site is an illustration. None is a photograph, and none is a record of anything a person did. This page says how each kind is made, from what, and where the official photograph is.

The pieces

A member standing on the board, in the hero of their riding's page and on its map is a tin figure: a flat, outlined, cel-shaded standing figure on a base with a nameplate, in the manner of a painted toy soldier in ordinary modern clothes. It is drawn by Google's Gemini image model from the member's official House of Commons portrait, which is sent to Google's API with one fixed prompt, the same for every member. The prompt asks for an accurate, respectful likeness of the face as the photograph shows it, no caricature, no exaggeration, clothing only as shown and continued plainly below the photograph's frame, no accessories, props, symbols or party colour on the person. The drawing is keyed from its ground, trimmed and cut to the sizes the pages use. 173 of the 337 members with a House photograph have a tin figure, drawn between September 24 and October 2, 2026; the other 164 stand as a plain standee, a ringed disc carrying the member's portrait, captioned "no figure drawn yet".

One figure is drawn from no House portrait. Avi Lewis, the leader of the New Democratic Party, holds no seat and so has no official portrait; his figure was drawn with the same prompt from a photograph on Wikimedia Commons that its author released under CC0, and the figures' index names the file.

Where a member has no tin figure, the standee on their riding page's close-up board is an engraved bust: the head of a wood-engraved standing figure drawn the same way, in black ink on the paper. Twenty-eight have been drawn, nearly all of them the parties' leaders, past and present.

For each figure the lab keeps, beside the file, the prompt it was drawn with, the model and the source credit; for the engraved set, 22 of the 28 also carry the day they were drawn and 17 the source photograph's address.

The portraits

The standee where a member has neither, and the member's face on a riding's disc when the board is leaned in to a province, is a procedural engraving: the official photograph rendered as parallel hatching (on the standee) or posterized ink (on the disc) by a deterministic program, pixel by pixel, with the same settings for everyone. No model is involved. There is one for each of the 337 members who has a House photograph; a vacant seat has none.

The scene engravings

The engraving at the head of a story in the House's ledger, one for each of a sitting's stories, is drawn by the same image model from a written recipe, in the manner of a wood-engraving in an 1870s illustrated newspaper. The recipes show objects and places: ballot boxes on a folding table in a polling station, two chairs of state on a dais, a row of lecterns on a stage, a flatbed trailer of rolled steel at a border crossing; where a figure appears it is small, anonymous and seen from behind. No real person is in any of them, no banner, placard or screen carries anything, and nothing in them is staged as something that happened. Thirteen have been drawn.

The board's ground

The land the pieces stand on is a watercolour, and it is two kinds of picture. The country's terrain at rest, and each province's own painting when the board is leaned in to it, were painted by the same image model from the board's own outline as the layout and one chosen concept as the style, then cut to the land by a program; no place in them is a likeness of anything, and the names, the counters and the borders are the board's own, drawn over them. Below the provinces, a level's ground is drawn by a program from data alone, no model: the land is the board's own cut, the lakes and rivers are Natural Earth's, the relief is the elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles, the built-up ground is the ridings at a thousand people a square kilometre and more, and the farmland's extent is the one list kept by hand. Each kind of land is a translucent wash held to the terrain painting's own tones, its edges broken by noise and its pigment pooled darker along the inside of each edge, the way the painting's are; the hills are a few flat wash steps rather than a shaded relief, the lakes pale blue-grey patches, and the whole is multiplied into the paper as the terrain is. A ground is held to a measured gate before it is used: water painted as land, and land painted as water, over the whole and within three kilometres of the coast, must round to nothing after a pixel's tolerance, so a shore on the board is where the data puts it.

The marks

The icon in a browser's tab is the board itself: the thirteen provinces' outlines in ink inside a double rule, drawn from the board's own geometry by a program. A party's rosette is the site's own engraved monogram in the party's colour, never the party's logo. The double rule and the fleuron are the only ornaments; the paper's grain is a texture. None of these is a likeness.

What they are not

• Not photographs. A tin figure or a bust is a drawing after a photograph, and the page it is on says so: the riding page's caption reads "Illustration after the official portrait © House of Commons", and the board's foot says that its pieces are illustrations after the official portraits.
• Not records. No picture on the site shows a person doing or saying anything. The record is the figures and the dated events; the pictures only stand for the pieces.
• Not labelled inside the file. The image files carry no embedded metadata and no visible mark saying how they were made; Google states that every image its Gemini models generate carries SynthID, an invisible watermark (Gemini API documentation), which the site has not tested for. The caption beside each picture is its label; a picture copied without its caption loses it.
• Not official. The official photograph of a member is the House of Commons', on the member's page at ourcommons.ca, which every riding page links and names in its structured data as the member's image. The House's portraits are used under the Speaker's Permission, for non-commercial purposes.

Taking a likeness down

A member who does not want their likeness drawn may ask for it to be taken down by writing to corrections@politicalrecord.ca. The rule is that such a request is honoured. The figures were drawn from the House's portraits as they stood in September and October 2026; a member who takes a seat after that stands as a standee until a figure is drawn.