MP stock trades in Canada: what is and is not disclosed

There is no Canadian STOCK Act

In the United States, the STOCK Act requires members of Congress to report each purchase or sale above a threshold within 45 days, which is why American trade trackers exist and update constantly. Canada has no equivalent. No federal rule requires an MP to report an individual transaction, on any timeline, in a public feed.

What Canada publishes instead is a position: a periodic description of what a member holds. You can often learn that an MP owns shares in a named company. You generally cannot learn when they bought them, when they sold, or how much they made.

What the rules do require

• Every MP files a confidential disclosure statement under the Conflict of Interest Code for Members, and the Ethics Commissioner publishes a summary of it. Material changes go to the Commissioner within 60 days, and the summary is amended where needed. The summary describes holdings without dollar values.
• Ministers, parliamentary secretaries and other reporting public office holdersare additionally covered by the Conflict of Interest Act. They must report a material change within 30 days, and they cannot simply keep publicly traded securities: controlled assets must be divested within 120 days of appointment, either sold at arm's length or placed in a blind trust.
• A blind trust is not a disclosure. Once assets are in one, the office holder is not supposed to know what the trustee does with them, and the public does not get a transaction list either. It is a conflict-management tool, not a transparency tool.

Where provinces differ

Provincial regimes publish holdings on their own terms. Ontario is the most explicit: under the Members' Integrity Act, the Integrity Commissioner publishes a statement for each MPP listing assets at or above $2,500, without values, excluding a principal residence, recreational property and broadly based mutual funds. That is detailed enough to name individual securities, which is why our Ontario coverage includes specific tickers. Details are in our Ontario disclosure guide.

What Integrity Index actually holds

We would rather be precise than impressive here:

• Federal MPs: no trade records at all.Not because we have not ingested them, but because no such public record exists. Any federal "trade tracker" you see is either inferring from disclosure summaries or describing American politicians.
• Ontario MPPs: holdings, not transactions.For 90 members we store the securities named in their public disclosure statements, captured from the Commissioner's registry as a point-in-time snapshot. A row means "this was disclosed as held", never "this was bought on this date".

Where those holdings sit in a sector a member's committee oversees, the overlap is flagged for review on their profile. A flag is a prompt to read the original filing, not a finding that a rule was broken. Findings of that kind come only from the federal Ethics Commissioner or a provincial integrity commissioner, and they are published as reports.

How to investigate a suspicion responsibly

1. Read the member's disclosure summary in full, including entries that belong to a spouse, and note its date.
2. Check what the member actually did in the House: their voting record and committee assignments say more about influence than a holding does.
3. Check whether they are a minister or parliamentary secretary, because the divestment rules change the picture entirely.
4. Go to the registry before publishing anything. Every figure on this site links back to the government source it came from.

Start at Members, or read How the Integrity Score Works for how holdings and flags feed into a grade.