About ChatYYJ

What this site is

ChatYYJ covers Victoria and Greater Victoria (Capital Regional District). It has three parts, and the differences between them matter:

• The city reference. Pages built from primary sources — Statistics Canada census and population estimates, Environment Canada climate normals, air quality and forecasts, and Victoria’s own published service pages. Every figure carries the table, station or page it came from, so you can check it.
• The editorial guides. Researched, written and reviewed guides on how local systems actually work — transit, waste, winter operations, city services. Human-authored, dated, and citing the official sources they rely on.
• The lookup assistant. A conversational tool for questions the pages do not cover. Answers are generated at the moment you ask and are not reviewed by a person before you see them, so it is the least reliable of the three.

We are explicit about which is which because they carry different levels of reliability. Treat the reference and the guides as checked material, and the assistant as a fast starting point.

Where our information comes from

Reference pages are built by reading the primary source directly rather than copying secondary reporting. Where a fact could not be confirmed against an official page, we leave it out and say on the page that we have. We add nothing that is estimated, averaged or assumed — an omission is always preferable to a number we cannot stand behind.

Because fares, fees, hours and deadlines change constantly, we link to the live official page for anything volatile rather than freezing a figure into the text where it would quietly go stale. Our full source register, including licences and how often each dataset is updated, is on the sources page.

How the assistant works

When you ask a question, the assistant retrieves relevant local context for Victoria, passes it to a large language model with instructions scoped to this city, and streams the answer back. Several models are used in a fallback chain for reliability.

Two honest caveats. Language models can state things confidently and incorrectly, so verify anything consequential against the official source. And the assistant is not an official channel: it cannot submit a request, pay a fee or act on your behalf. See our editorial standards for how we treat generated answers.

How we are funded

The site is funded by display advertising. That funding does not buy coverage. Advertisers do not review or approve content, and we do not accept payment for coverage or for inclusion in a guide. We do not use affiliate links, so we earn nothing from any outbound link. Ads never appear on the assistant, on these policy pages, or on any page without substantial content of its own.

Corrections and contact

We publish corrections rather than quietly editing. Every correction we have made is listed in the corrections log, and a dated record of what has changed on the site is on the what’s new page. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us at hello@chatyyj.com.

Editorial and general enquiries: hello@chatyyj.com. See our contact page for details.