Integrity Score
Also known as: Integrity Rank
Integrity Index Canada's 0–100 composite score, shown as a letter grade, summarising a representative's record across weighted transparency factors drawn from official sources.
What it means
The score is built from up to twelve weighted factors grouped into three areas. Disclosure and conflicts is the largest: filed financial disclosures, conflict flags from cross-referencing holdings against the sectors a member's committees oversee, and entries missing a source. Participation and legislative work covers the share of recorded divisions the member took part in, committee roles, and bills sponsored (in every legislature whose bill sponsors we track: federal, Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Quebec). Money and influence covers lobbying contacts, government contracts, trades, political contributions, office expenditures and delegation travel, wherever each is published.
Only the factors actually published for a member's legislature are counted. Missing data is left out of the calculation rather than scored as zero, because scoring an absent feed as a failure would punish members for their legislature's publishing practices rather than for anything they did. Where a member has fewer than three data streams we show Unscored instead of a grade.
That design decision has a consequence worth stating plainly: scores are most comparable within a jurisdiction and least comparable across jurisdictions. A federal MP is scored against a much richer set of feeds than a member of a legislature that publishes neither divisions nor disclosures. Comparing two members of the same chamber is meaningful; comparing a federal MP to a provincial member of a roster-only jurisdiction largely compares data availability.
The score is a summary of public records, not a judgement about a person's character or their politics. It contains no assessment of policy positions, and party affiliation is not an input.
The model is reviewed periodically and the grade thresholds and factor list are published in full on the methodology page. Scores are recalculated as new data lands, so a score is a snapshot of what the sources said at the time of the last sync.
Why two members can differ without either doing anything wrong
Two members sit in different legislatures. One sits where recorded divisions and disclosure filings are both published in machine-readable form; the other sits where neither is. The first member gets a score built from several factors. The second may not be scored at all.
Nothing in that comparison is about the members. It is about what their legislatures publish. This is why every score on the site sits next to a factor breakdown, and why the coverage page exists.
How it shows up in our data
The score appears on every member profile beside a letter grade and a per-factor breakdown, on the leaderboard as a ranking within jurisdiction, on the Compare tool as a side-by-side, and on the Integrity Map as the fill colour for each riding.
Ranks are recomputed by a scheduled job using the same calculation the API serves, so the order on the leaderboard stays consistent with the score on the profile. A member showing no score has not been penalised — they have too few published data streams to score.
Related on Integrity Index
Sources
- CIEC public registry — disclosure inputs
- House of Commons — vote inputs
- Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying — lobbying inputs
Last reviewed: