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Google Street View’s trolley pays a visit to Parliament Hill in Ottawa

The Google Maps Trolley collects Street View imagery of Canada's House of Commons

The Google Street View team has taken a break from driving around in the Google car to head inside Canada’s Parliament Buildings, so Canadians and others around the world can see where the country’s top politicians go to work every day.

A blog post from the Google Canada team explains that virtual visitors will be able to go on a tour of the Hall of Honour, the Memorial Tower, the Peace Tower and Confederation Hall, all from the comfort of their computer. You can even “stand” in the foyer of the House of Commons, and pretend that you’re in one of the media scrums we’ve all seen on television that take place there.

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There won’t be any politicians speaking to the media in these images, though. MPs are currently still on break, and won’t be back in the House until April 15. So if you’re hoping to spot Stephen Harper sitting in his office, or Jason Kenney popping out for a coffee when the pictures go online, you’ll be out of luck. The virtual tour will, however, let you in to areas normally restricted to the public, like the Prime Minister’s office and the office of the leader of the opposition, The Ottawa Citizen reports.

Google says that the images will go online in the coming months, but there’s no specific date yet.

The images were captured using the Google Street View team’s Trolley, an apparatus designed to go inside museums and other indoor places of interest where the usual Google Street View car wouldn’t be welcome. It has a camera mounted on a push-cart, which can slowly be navigated by a Google employee inside the landmark of interest. The Trolley has already been inside major landmarks like Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, the White House and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can check out some of the other places the Trolley has visited in the Street View Gallery.

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Google’s arsenal of Street View equipment has been taken to other locations in Canada, including the Trike which traversed Cambridge Bay to give a look at a community in Canada’s Arctic, and the Snowmobile that documented what it’s like to ski down a mountain in Whistler. Google also recently returned to Nunavut with its newest piece of equipment, the ‘Trekker,’ which is a backpack worn by a hiker, and can help document places you can only reach on foot.

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