What you're agreeing to when you use Demos.

1. Who this agreement is with

"Demos" is a Canadian civic-engagement service operated by Alex Makosz at demosvoice.ca. "You" is the person creating a Demos account, joining the waitlist, or otherwise using the service.

By creating an account, joining the waitlist, or using the service in any way, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, please don't use the service.

2. Your account

You must be 18 or older

Demos accounts are for adults eligible to vote in Canadian federal elections. If we learn that someone under 18 has created an account, we'll delete it.

One account per person

Please create only one account. If you need to start over (e.g., you no longer have access to the email on file), delete the old account first or write to hello@demosvoice.ca.

Accurate information

Use a real email address you control and a postal code that actually reflects where you live. We use your postal code to match you to your Member of Parliament — using someone else's postal code defeats that purpose and counts as misrepresentation.

Account security

You're responsible for keeping your password confidential. Don't share your account with anyone. If you think your account has been accessed by someone else, write to hello@demosvoice.ca and reset your password.

3. Acceptable use

Demos exists to help Canadians engage with their Parliament. To keep the service usable for everyone, you agree not to:

• Harass anyone — including your Member of Parliament, their staff, other elected officials, Demos staff, or any other person, through Demos or because of something on Demos
• Send threats, intimidation, or hateful content through any Demos feature, including MP-contact emails and petition drafts
• Misrepresent yourself — pretend to be someone else, use a fake or stolen identity, sign up with a postal code you don't live in
• Spam — bulk-create accounts, sign petitions you haven't read, or submit waitlist forms in volume
• Try to break the service — attempt to gain unauthorized access, probe for vulnerabilities (other than through good-faith responsible disclosure to hello@demosvoice.ca), reverse-engineer the system, or interfere with other users
• Scrape — bulk-download Demos's content using automated tools, except as expressly permitted by an API we may eventually publish. The underlying Parliament data is public and free for you to read directly from LEGISinfo, OpenParliament.ca, and ourcommons.ca.
• Use Demos for illegal purposes — to harass anyone in a way that breaks Canadian law, infringe copyright, defame anyone, or distribute illegal content
• Use the service to send bulk emails to MPs from accounts you control or that you've encouraged others to create — Demos is for individual civic engagement, not mass-mail campaigns

4. Content you create

You own what you write

Petition drafts, custom email text, free-text notes, and anything else you author in Demos belong to you. We don't claim ownership, we don't sell rights in your content to anyone, and we don't share it with third parties for purposes other than what you explicitly use Demos for.

We have a limited license to operate the service

To make Demos work, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store, display, format, and process your content for the purpose of providing the service to you. For example: to store a petition draft so you can resume editing it, to render an MP-email draft on your screen, to send a digest email you've opted into. This license ends when you delete the content or your account, except where retention is legally required.

What we'll do with your content after you leave

When you delete your account or specific content, we delete it according to the rules in our Privacy Policy retention table. Briefly: petition drafts get hard-deleted; your ratings on bills and petitions get anonymized (stripped of any link to you) rather than deleted, so the aggregate constituent tally for your MP remains accurate.

Public petitions are a special case

If you submit a petition through Parliament's portal at petitions.ourcommons.ca, the petition itself becomes a public parliamentary document. We can delete our copy of your draft on request, but we can't delete the public petition from Parliament's records. That's between you and Parliament.

5. Contacting your MP through Demos

This is important enough to call out separately.

When you use Demos to draft an email to your Member of Parliament, the workflow is:

1. Demos helps you compose the email — choose an approach, select talking points, optionally use AI assistance to refine the wording
2. You review the draft
3. The email opens in your own mail application, sent from your own email address, with you as the sender
4. You hit send

This matters because:

The same applies to any other communication you send through Demos, including petition sponsorship requests to MPs, shared social posts, and waitlist notes.

6. AI assistance

Demos uses AI in two ways:

1. For us: to summarize bills, debates, and petitions from public Parliament data. Every AI-generated summary is reviewed by a human before you see it. This is described in detail on the landing page and in our explainer pages.
2. For you (optional): AI-assisted drafting of petition text or MP emails. This is opt-in per drafting session, and you can default it off entirely in your settings.

When you use AI assistance for drafting:

• The draft is a starting point, not a finished product. You should read it, edit it, and confirm it says what you actually mean.
• AI-generated text can be inaccurate, miss nuance, or fail to reflect your intent. Don't send anything you haven't reviewed.
• Demos and its AI providers don't guarantee the accuracy of generated text. If you send an AI-drafted email that contains errors or claims you don't endorse, you're still responsible for it (see Section 5).

7. Service availability and beta status

Demos is in closed beta at the effective date of these Terms. That means:

• Features may change, appear, or disappear without much notice. We try to communicate major changes via email, but we don't guarantee it.
• The service may be unavailable for maintenance, deployment, or due to unexpected outages. We don't promise any specific uptime.
• Data refreshes from Parliament happen on a schedule (currently nightly + hourly for petition signature counts). Information you see may be up to 24 hours behind reality.
• Beta access is free. We don't currently charge for any feature. If we ever do, we'll communicate clearly and never enable charges silently.

8. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

Demos is not legal or political advice

The summaries, classifications, and "what this means for you" notes you see in Demos reflect our best interpretation of public parliamentary information. They are not legal advice, political advice, or a replacement for reading the actual bills, hansard transcripts, or petitions for yourself. Major decisions about how to engage with Parliament should be informed by primary sources too.

Our analysis can be wrong

Our matching algorithm, bill summaries, debate arguments, and MP voting records are produced by a combination of public data ingestion, AI summarization, and human review. They will sometimes be incomplete, miss recent changes, or reflect editorial judgment you disagree with. We work to be accurate; we don't claim infallibility.

The service is provided "as is"

To the maximum extent permitted by British Columbia and Canadian law: Demos is provided as-is, without warranties of any kind (express or implied), including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any data you see is up-to-the-minute accurate.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither Demos nor its operator will be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the service. Our total aggregate liability to you for any claim arising from these Terms or your use of Demos will not exceed CAD $100 or the total amount you have paid for the service in the previous 12 months, whichever is greater. (At beta, the service is free, so this is effectively CAD $100.)

None of the limitations above exclude liability for things that can't be excluded under Canadian law — for example, our own gross negligence, willful misconduct, or fraud.

9. Ending the agreement

You can leave at any time

Delete your account from your dashboard or write to hello@demosvoice.ca. Once you do, your account data is handled as described in our Privacy Policy.

If you violate these Terms

If we believe you've violated these Terms, our default approach is:

1. Warning email describing what we observed and asking you to stop, with a 7-day cure window
2. If the behaviour continues, or for a first violation that's severe (e.g., threats sent through Demos, account takeover attempts, clear fraud), account termination
3. Appeal path: reply to the termination email and explain your side. We will read every appeal and respond within 14 days. If we decide the termination was correct, we'll explain why; if we decide we got it wrong, we'll restore your account.

For severe violations involving safety — credible threats of harm to a person, criminal activity, or attempts to compromise the service or its users — we may skip the warning and terminate immediately. The appeal path still applies.

What happens to your data on termination

Same as if you delete the account yourself. See the Privacy Policy retention table.

10. Changes to these Terms

If we make a material change to these Terms — meaning one that affects your rights or obligations in a meaningful way — we will:

1. Email registered users at least 14 days before the change takes effect, explaining what's changing and why
2. Update the effective date and version number at the top of this page
3. Keep the previous version archived and link to it from the new version for at least one year

Continuing to use Demos after the effective date of a change means you accept the new Terms. If you don't, the right thing to do is delete your account before then.

Non-material changes (typo fixes, link updates, clarifications) are made without notice but reflected in the version history.

11. Contact

Questions, complaints, vulnerability disclosures, or anything else: hello@demosvoice.ca.

For privacy-specific requests, see our Privacy Policy — same address, but the policy spells out the specific rights you have under PIPEDA and (if applicable) Quebec's Law 25.