About Ask Cowichan

Ask Cowichan is an independent civic tool for the Cowichan Valley Regional District (CVRD) in British Columbia. It has two parts: a voting tool for the Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw, and a research tool that helps residents find plain-language answers about local government services, bylaws, zoning, permits, and public decisions, grounded in actual CVRD documents with source citations.

How the vote works

Every section and clause of the draft Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw has been turned into a plain-language summary so you don't need to wade through hundreds of pages of legal text to know what's being proposed for your property. Sign up with an email address, confirm it, and you can vote support or oppose on any section that matters to you. Optionally tell us your zone and electoral area, and we'll show you how the vote is breaking down across the valley.

How the research tool works

The Q&A side searches official CVRD documents crawled from cvrd.ca and related sites, including bylaws, official community plans, board meeting minutes, development applications, and public notices. When you ask a question, the system finds the most relevant passages and generates an answer with citations back to the original sources.

The document collection is updated weekly through automated crawlers that check for new and changed content on CVRD websites. All document versions are archived so changes can be tracked over time.

What it is not

• Not an official CVRD service or product.
• Not a source of legal advice.
• Not a replacement for contacting the CVRD directly for official matters.
• Not affiliated with any political party or campaign.

AI-generated summaries and answers should always be verified against the original source documents, especially for important decisions. The system can make mistakes.

About the creator

Ask Cowichan was built by Francis Hall, an independent developer based in the Cowichan Valley.

Francis moved to Canada from the UK in 2019, fell in love with the country's natural beauty, and became a Canadian citizen. In 2025 he started WTF Canada, a blog observing what feels like a decline across nearly every measure of how the country is run, in the hope that pointing it out clearly is part of how we turn it around.

Ask Cowichan came out of the same impulse, scoped to one valley: civic information should be findable, understandable, and actionable, especially for the decisions that affect where you live. Francis is inspired by nature and driven to help create a world that's more bearable to live in.

Ask Cowichan is non-commercial and has no affiliation with the CVRD. If you have questions, ideas, corrections, or want to help, you can reach Francis via the contact form or sign up on the volunteer page.

Technology

The site is built with Next.js and PostgreSQL, self-hosted on a small server in Canada. Plain-language bylaw summaries are generated by Google Gemini (via OpenRouter); document search combines vector similarity (AI embeddings) with traditional keyword search to find the best matches. Answers in the research tool are constrained to information found in the document collection, with citations back to source.