The window moves.
The map does not.

The horizontal axis runs from collective economics — redistribution, public ownership, strong labour bargaining — on the left, to market economics — private ownership, deregulation, capital mobility — on the right. The vertical axis runs from civil liberty at the bottom — open speech, judicial restraint on state surveillance, narrow police powers — to surveillance and speech control at the top — warrantless data access, expansive hate-speech offences, mandatory platform duties.

These axes are not new. The Political Compass has used something close to them for two decades. What this project adds is the dashed rectangle: a moving Overton window, sized to enclose the positions a sitting federal politician could publicly hold in a given year without ending their career.

In 1945, the window was anchored in the lower-left quadrant. Post-war consensus meant redistribution, organised labour, and a presumption against state interference in private life. By 1985, the Reagan–Thatcher–Mulroney decade had pulled it decisively rightward on economics while modestly tightening cultural authority.

After 2001, the vertical axis is where most of the movement happens. Warrantless surveillance, no-fly lists, secret evidence, mandatory data retention — positions that would have been disqualifying for a cabinet minister in 1985 became the working centre of both major parties on both sides of the border. The shift was bipartisan and quiet.

By 2025, the window's centre has moved roughly forty degrees from where it sat eighty years ago. The reference positions on the map — anarchist, libertarian, digital-rights, New Deal — have not moved at all. They simply fell outside.

Several bills in the current Parliament sit inside the 2025 Overton window. In 1985 most of them — and in 1945 all of them — would have been outside it. The bills themselves are not the point. The point is that the window has moved to enclose them.

Keyframes were drawn for 1945, 1965, 1985, 2005, and 2025. Each window's centre and dimensions were chosen to enclose the publicly held positions of sitting Canadian and US federal politicians at that year — what a serving cabinet minister or shadow minister could say without ending their career. Movement between keyframes is linear interpolation. The faint dashed rectangles show prior keyframe windows; the solid rectangle is the current year.

The plotted reference points are static coordinates in the political space, not the Overton window. Anarchism, libertarianism, the Nordic model, and digital-rights organising have not moved. What changed is whether holding their positions is career-ending.

This is a prototype. Edge cases are everywhere — the CCP point illustrates that two axes cannot fully capture state-capitalist or theocratic regimes, which need at least a third dimension. The choice to use two axes is a deliberate simplification, not a claim that two are enough.