About kyg

A free tool for understanding what the Government of Canada does with public money and who's influencing those decisions.

Data sources

openparliament.ca: Community-maintained mirror of Parliament data: MPs, bills, votes, debates. Clean JSON API. Source of the MP list and photos.
Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying: Federal registry of every meeting between a registered lobbyist and a designated public office holder. Mandatory monthly reporting since 2008. Bulk CSV via open.canada.ca.
open.canada.ca proactive disclosure: Every federal grant ≥ $25,000 and every contract ≥ $10,000 must be publicly disclosed. We pull the full historical CSV from each dataset.

Why Canada is different from the US

Corporations and unions cannot donate to federal politicians or parties in Canada — banned since 2007. Individual contribution limits are also tiny (around $1,750/party/year). So the "follow the money" story is small.

But Canada records lobbying in extraordinary detail. Every meeting between a registered lobbyist and a federal official is logged with date, parties, and topic. That's the real influence signal, and we focus there.

Combined with full spending disclosure (grants and contracts), you can ask questions no individual source can answer: Did this company lobby the relevant ministry before the contract was awarded? After?

Caveats

Correlation, not causation. A lobbying contact followed by a grant is a starting point, not proof.
Fuzzy name matching. Different spellings of the same entity may appear separately. The /recipients lookup uses substring matching to catch most variants.
Below-threshold spending is invisible. Contracts under $10k and grants under $25k aren't in the proactive disclosure.
DPOH → MP matching is best-effort. Names in the lobbying registry don't always match the names from openparliament.ca, especially with accents and middle initials. Some MPs will show fewer lobbying contacts than they actually received.
Recent data only. Lobbying registry goes back to 2008; grants/contracts back to ~2018 with reasonable coverage. Older periods are sparse.

What's coming

Promises: mandate letters, throne speeches, budget pledges — with fulfilled/broken status
Topic dashboards: lobbying volume + spending + commitments on a single theme over time
Better DPOH ↔ MP matching
Lobbying registrations (broader than communication reports)