Political integrity data in Canada: where it lives

Five kinds of record

Canadian political accountability data falls into a handful of families. Knowing which family a question belongs to tells you where to look.

• Ethics and financial disclosure.Federally, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner publishes disclosure summaries for MPs and public office holders. Each province has its own commissioner under its own statute, such as Ontario's Members' Integrity Act.
• Legislative activity.Bills, reading stages and recorded divisions, published by each chamber. Federally that is LEGISinfo and the House's open data.
• Lobbying. The federal Commissioner of Lobbying runs a registry of registered lobbyists and their communications with designated public office holders. Several provinces run their own; some publish nothing that can be tied to an individual member.
• Public money.Procurement and contract disclosure, plus members' office expenditures, published by the relevant assembly or treasury body.
• Political finance. Contributions to parties and candidates, published by Elections Canada and its provincial counterparts.

Published is not the same as usable

The gap that matters is between a record being public and a record being machine-readable. All five families above are "public" everywhere in Canada. In practice they arrive as anything from a documented API to a scanned page, and the difference decides what anyone can build.

Saskatchewan is a clean illustration. Its recorded divisions are fully public, but they exist only as lists of names inside each sitting day's minutes, with no vote database behind them. Turning those into per-member records meant reading all 106 sittings of the current Legislature and validating each list against the count printed in its heading. That work is described in What Saskatchewan's 35 Recorded Divisions Show. The same pattern repeats across the country in different shapes.

What we hold today

As of September 2026 Integrity Index covers 1,047 sitting federal and provincial legislators, of whom 850 have enough data to carry an integrity score. The spread is wide:

• House of Commons: disclosures, recorded divisions, office expenditures, delegation travel and committee roles for essentially the whole chamber.
• Ontario: the deepest provincial coverage, including disclosed holdings, contributions, contracts and expenditures.
• Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan: disclosures and recorded divisions.
• British Columbia, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick: partial, generally disclosures with one other stream.
• Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island: rosters and bills only, so their members carry no score.

The full picture, including why a member can sit in a well-covered legislature and still be unscored, is in Why Some Members Have No Grade and on the Data coverage page.

Principles we work by

1. Never fabricate a gap. A missing stream is shown as missing. Nothing is estimated, modelled or filled in, and a member with too little data is marked unscored rather than given a middling grade.
2. Always link the source. Every figure on a profile traces back to the government page it came from, so you can check it and cite that instead of us.
3. Flags are questions. An automated overlap between two datasets is a prompt to look closer. Findings that a rule was broken come only from ethics and integrity commissioners.
4. Explain the method. The scoring model is public, down to the weights, in Methodology and How the Integrity Score Works.

Starting points

To research a specific person, begin at Members or My Riding. To research a specific decision, start from Legislation and follow the divisions. If you know of a public source we are missing for your province, tell us through the contact page.