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.

• 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 including donor name, type, amount, recipient party, and electoral district.
• OpenParliament API— MP biographical data, party affiliation, riding information.

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.

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

Government expense disclosures are published quarterly. Our data pipeline fetches and processes new data on the same quarterly cadence. Lobbying communication logs are updated more frequently but we batch-process them quarterly as well.

• 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.