Footer Subscribe button bypasses the current Build Canada subscribe experience

[macoyj]

Problem

The Subscribe button in the Canada Spends footer links straight to Substack:

src/components/MainLayout/Footer.tsx:76

<a
  href="https://buildcanada.substack.com/subscribe"
  target="_blank"
  className="bg-primary text-primary-foreground px-3 py-2 ..."
>
  Subscribe
</a>

This diverges from the Build Canada Subscribe experience as it now works. Build Canada's subscribe flow has moved on to a logged-in experience and collects additional information, notably postal code. Anyone converting from the Canada Spends footer skips all of that and lands in a bare Substack email capture.

Why it matters

• Data gap. Subscribers acquired via Canada Spends arrive with an email address and nothing else. No postal code means these signups can't be segmented by riding/region the way the rest of the list can, and Canada Spends is a meaningful share of top-of-funnel traffic.
• Two different front doors. A visitor subscribing from Canada Spends gets a materially different flow from one subscribing on buildcanada.com, including whether an account gets created at all.
• Attribution. Unlike the header CTA (see Nav: remove dead Get Involved link, switch CTA to Follow Build Canada #278, which deliberately carried utm_source / utm_medium / utm_campaign across when the URL changed), this footer link carries no UTM parameters at all, so footer-driven subscriptions aren't attributable to Canada Spends in the first place.

What to decide

1. Should the footer point at the Build Canada subscribe experience instead of Substack directly, so Canada Spends signups collect postal code and hit the same logged-in flow?
2. If yes, what is the canonical URL for that flow? Worth pinning down before wiring it up: www.buildcanada.com/subscribe currently 404s, so the entry point is somewhere else.
3. Either way, add utm_source=canadaspends&utm_medium=footer so this converts measurably, matching the header convention.

Notes

• The Subscribe string in the footer is also not wrapped in <Trans>, unlike every other string in that component, so it does not appear in the .po catalogs and stays English on /fr. Small, but worth fixing in the same change.
• Raised alongside Footer: remove dead Get Involved link #282, which removes the dead Get Involved link from the same footer. Deliberately kept separate: Footer: remove dead Get Involved link #282 is a straightforward dead-link removal, this one needs a product decision first.

Verification note

The 404 on www.buildcanada.com/subscribe and the Canada Spends footer code above are both confirmed. The specifics of the current Build Canada subscribe flow (logged-in experience, postal code collection) are as reported rather than independently verified here, since that UI is client-rendered and wasn't visible from the served HTML.

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