About & Methodology

FedAccountability is an independent transparency tool that visualizes how money and influence flow through the Canadian federal government. It aggregates publicly available data from official government sources and presents it through interactive Sankey diagrams.

Live integration status, record counts, and last refresh times for each feed are on the Data sources page.

• MP Expenditures— Quarterly proactive disclosure from ourcommons.ca. Includes salaries, travel, hospitality, office, printing, contracts, and other expenses.
• Lobbying Registry— Federal lobbying registrations and communications from lobbycanada.gc.ca. Includes lobbyist identity, client organization, subject matter, and which designated public office holders were contacted.
• Elections Canada— Political contribution data from Elections Canada, including donor name, type, amount, recipient party, and electoral district.
• OpenParliament API— MP biographical data, party affiliation, riding information from OpenParliament.
• Natural Resources Canada— Energy pricing and fuel tax data from Natural Resources Canada.

Sankey diagrams show flows between categories. The width of each band is proportional to the quantity it represents. In our MP expense Sankeys, the flow goes from an MP's name to expense categories to subcategories, with band width representing dollar amounts.

For lobbying diagrams, flows represent the number of logged communications (meetings), not dollars, since lobbying data does not include monetary amounts. The main lobbying flow map samples up to 25,000 communications per view (newest first) and can be narrowed by calendar year; MP pages aggregate the full set matched to that MP.

Donation diagrams show actual CAD amounts flowing from donor categories through parties to recipients.

Government expense disclosures are published quarterly; our ingestion jobs align roughly with that cadence, but actual run timing varies by feed. Lobbying and OpenParliament-backed tables can refresh more often when pipelines succeed.

Underlying scorecard data is sampled through Mar 22, 4043, 12:00 a.m. (latest of votes, speeches, expense updates, lobbying, donations, and pipeline cursor activity). Latest source refresh: openparliament_votes at Jun 30, 2026, 8:01 a.m. (success).

Authoritative per-source timestamps and statuses: Data sources.

Lobbying-related grades use total contacts and concentration from a single client organization; thresholds are tuned for datasets on the order of tens to a few hundred contacts per MP so scores stay meaningful as registry coverage grows.

• Lobbying data shows communications (meetings), not financial transactions between lobbyists and politicians.
• Donation data from Elections Canada may lag by several months.
• MP-to-DPOH name matching uses fuzzy text similarity and may have occasional mismatches.
• This tool is not affiliated with the Government of Canada.

This project is built with Next.js, Plotly.js, Supabase, and deployed on Vercel. All data comes from official Canadian government open data portals.