This has several tools within it.

You can look up your own or any other riding by postal code, or by postal code fragment. This will call up a riding snapshot that will tell you the riding's candidates, 1997 results, and chief returning officer. You can also access a map of the riding.

Besides searching by postal code, you can browse by province. Either click on the map or the name of a province/territory, and it will bring you to a provincial snapshot page. That page will contain a summary of 1997 results and a list of all the province's ridings. That list will allow you to select a riding.

You can also call up a map of the province that will allow you to "drill down" to individual riding snapshots.

Once you hit a riding snapshot, you'll get a list of the candidates running by party, the 1997 riding population and number of eligible voters, information about the chief returning officer, and access to a full-sized map of the riding.

From the riding snapshot, you'll be able to access snapshots of each individual candidate. We're relying on them to supply the data, and some might not be complete, but it should should have contact information, their date and place of birth, occupation, education, why you should vote for them, and their political experience.

The candidate snapshot allows you to link back to the riding snapshot and to directly access the profiles of other candidates in the riding.

Simply type in the candidate's first or last name (not both). If it is an exact match, you'll be taken directly to the candidate's snapshot. A list will be generated when there's multiple matches.

Want to find out which candidates have Web sites? How about the percentage of female candidates by province/territory in 2000? Or identify the Ontario ridings where the Liberals benefitted by a 'splitting' of the right-wing vote between the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservatives in 1997?

Answer Finder will tell you.

It's an interactive tool that lets you "slice and dice" our online database of election information. We have the questions divided up into three segments:

• By Party
• By Province/territory
• Potpourri

Here are the questions for parties:

Here are the questions for provinces/territories:

• Seat total, summary by party, 1997
• Seat total, detail by party, 1997
• 1997 popular vote, by party
• Squeakers (less than 1,000-vote margin of victory, 1997)
• Percentage of female candidates, 2000

Here are the potpourri questions:

As you can see, there are umpteen different ways for political junkies to slice and dice data.