Financial disclosure
Also known as: Public disclosure summary, Asset declaration
A periodic filing in which a representative reports assets, liabilities, income sources, and outside activities to an ethics regulator.
What it means
Disclosure in Canada is a two-step process, and confusing the two steps is the most common mistake people make when reading a filing. Step one is confidential: the member sends the regulator a full statement of their financial position. Step two is public: the regulator produces a summary of that statement and puts it in a public registry.
The public summary is deliberately less detailed than the confidential filing. It names assets and liabilities in categories — a numbered company, a rental property, a line of credit — but it does not publish dollar amounts, account numbers or addresses. So a disclosure tells you what kind of interest a member holds, not how much of it. Any site that presents a Canadian public summary as a net-worth figure is inventing the number.
Federal MPs file with the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner under the Members' Code. Ministers and other public office holders file under the Conflict of Interest Act, which imposes stricter duties on top — divestment of controlled assets, and public declarations of certain gifts and recusals.
Provinces run their own regimes with their own commissioners and their own registries. Ontario's Integrity Commissioner publishes MPPs' public disclosure statements through OICO; Alberta, British Columbia and the other provinces each maintain equivalent offices. The regimes are similar in shape but differ in filing deadlines, thresholds and how much is published, so a provincial filing is not directly comparable to a federal one.
Disclosure is an ongoing obligation, not a one-off. Members file on entering office, update within set periods when something material changes, and review annually with the commissioner's office. A filing that has not been refreshed in a long time is itself a signal worth noticing.
Reading a public summary
A typical federal public disclosure summary lists things like "1234567 Ontario Inc. (private corporation)", "rental property, Ottawa" and "mortgage, chartered bank". It will not say what the company earns, what the property is worth, or what is outstanding on the mortgage.
That is enough to answer the question the regime is built for — does this member have a private interest that could be affected by a decision they participate in? — and not enough to answer the question people usually arrive with, which is how rich the member is. Keeping those two questions apart is the whole discipline of reading disclosure data.
How it shows up in our data
A member profile's disclosure section pulls the most recent public summary we have matched to that member, links back to the official registry entry, and timestamps the filing so you can judge how current it is.
Coverage is uneven and we publish the gaps rather than smoothing over them. Our live coverage readout lists the status of every disclosure, lobbying, bill and vote feed by jurisdiction; several provinces are roster-only, meaning we have the members but not their filings. Members without enough data streams are shown as Unscored instead of being given a grade built on nothing.
Related on Integrity Index
Sources
- CIEC public registry (federal)
- Ontario Integrity Commissioner — public disclosure statements
- Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons
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