MP financial disclosure in Canada

Two different rulebooks

People often say "the Conflict of Interest Act" for everything federal, but two instruments apply to different people. The Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons is part of the Standing Orders and applies to every MP. The Conflict of Interest Act is a statute that applies to public office holders, which means ministers, parliamentary secretaries, ministerial staff and most Governor in Council appointees. A cabinet minister is covered by both, and the Act is the stricter of the two.

Both are administered by the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, whose public registry is where the published documents live.

What an MP files, and when

Within 60 days of the notice of their election being published in the Canada Gazette, and again for each annual review the Commissioner sets, an MP files a confidential disclosure statement. It covers their private interests and those of their family: assets, liabilities, income, and outside activities such as directorships or a continuing business.

Three deadlines follow from that filing, and all three run on 60 days:

• Material change. When something in the statement changes materially, the MP has 60 days to tell the Commissioner, who decides whether the public summary needs amending.
• Gifts and other benefits. A gift or benefit worth more than $200 from one source over a 12-month period must be disclosed within 60 days. Ordinary courtesy and protocol gifts received in the normal course of the job are treated differently.
• Sponsored travel. When travel costs more than $200 and is not paid by the MP, their party, the Crown or a recognised parliamentary association, the trip must be disclosed within 60 days of its end.

Confidential statement versus public summary

The filing itself is not published. The Commissioner's office prepares a disclosure summaryfrom it, the MP has 60 days to review and approve that summary, and then it becomes public on the Commissioner's website and available for inspection at the office.

The practical consequence is that the public record describes interests rather than pricing them. You can usually learn that an MP holds shares in a named company or owns a rental property, and not what either is worth. Categories the Code exempts, such as ordinary personal property, do not appear at all. So the absence of an entry is not proof of the absence of an interest: it may simply be outside what the Code asks for.

The extra rules for ministers

Under the Act, reporting public office holders face tighter obligations than backbench MPs. A material change must be reported within 30 days, not 60. Controlled assets, meaning things like publicly traded securities whose value a government decision could move, must be divested within 120 days of appointment, either by selling at arm's length or by placing them in a blind trust. After leaving office a cooling-off period applies to certain dealings with government, one year for most reporting public office holders and two years for ministers.

How to read a summary without over-reading it

1. Check the date. A summary reflects the last filing or amendment. An MP appointed to cabinet or one who sold a holding last month may not show it yet.
2. Separate the person from the family. Some entries belong to a spouse or dependent child. They are disclosed because the Code treats them as relevant, not because the MP controls them.
3. Look for overlap, not for wrongdoing. A holding in a regulated sector is worth noting when the MP sits on the committee that oversees that sector. That is a question to ask, not an answer. Only the Commissioner can find that a rule was broken, and those findings are published as examination reports.

What Integrity Index adds

We ingest the public summaries and attach them to the right member, so you can search by name or riding instead of browsing a registry. As of September 2026 we hold disclosures for 333 of the 346 sitting MPs, and federal members without at least one disclosure on file are left unscored rather than given a grade. Each entry links back to its source so you can confirm the original wording.

Start from Members or look up your riding with My Riding. For how disclosures feed a grade, read How the Integrity Score Works, and for what we hold in each province see Data coverage.