Methodology

Every figure on Insider Express is read out of a public government filing. This page says which filing, how often we re-read it, how we count, and — just as important — what the numbers do not tell you.

Last updated 14 September 2026

Where every number comes from

Record opens that exact row on the source's own site. Filing opens the document the row was read out of — a member's disclosure statement, which lists many holdings. Registry opens the public registry that publishes it, because that source does not give individual records their own addresses.

How lobbying meetings are counted

One reported communication can involve several officials and several subjects. In the registry's own data that becomes several rows. We count it once.

Every total on the lobbying pages counts distinct communications, not communication-by-official pairs. This matters when comparing us to other trackers: a meeting between one company and three officials is one meeting here, and can be three elsewhere. Our numbers will sometimes look lower. They are not missing anything.

What the donation records leave out

Elections Canada publishes a contributor's name only once their total contributions to one recipient pass $200 in a year. Below that line the money is real and lawfully given, but the donor is named to no one: the recipient must record a name above $20 and keeps it in its own books, and Elections Canada receives only a lump sum. There is no public list of small donors — not on this site, and not anywhere.

The threshold counts the total, not each donation, and that catches people out. Someone giving $50 a month passes $200 with their fifth payment and is then published in full, every contribution itemised. Someone giving $15 a month never appears at all. This is why roughly 171,000 of the 1.1 million contributions on this site are themselves under $200: once a donor crosses the line, all of their giving becomes public, including the small amounts. "Donations under $200 are not public" is the common reading of the rule, and it is not what the rule says.

So every donor count here is a count of disclosed donors, and every party total is the disclosed total. Both understate real support, and they understate it unevenly: a party funded by many small monthly gifts will look smaller in this data than one funded by fewer large cheques, even at identical revenue. Recurring-giving programs sit exactly on this line. We cannot correct for it, because the missing records do not exist in public form.

Coverage also starts in 2015. Contributions before then were reported to Elections Canada under the same rules but are not in the data used here, so a long-standing donor's history will look shorter than it is.

What the timeframes mean

The 90-day, 1-year and 10-year windows are anchored on the newest filing in the data, not today's date. Registries publish in batches, so a window measured from today would silently shrink whenever a source paused — the last week of a "90 days" view would quietly become empty rather than obviously stale.

The federal lobbying registry starts on 2 July 2008. The 10-year window covers roughly 287,000 of the 381,000 communications on file; the rest are older than the window, not absent.

What a disclosure is — and is not

• Politicians' holdings are what, never how much. Canadian political disclosure requires naming an asset, not its value. Nothing on this site knows the size of anyone's position, and any figure implying otherwise would be invented.
• "First seen" is not a purchase date. It is when a holding first became visible to us in a public statement. It is often much later than the purchase, and sometimes much later than the filing.
• Most trades carry no transaction date at all. Where a member filed a notice of material change, the registry states the day the position moved and that is the date shown. Otherwise the change is read by comparing two consecutive disclosure summaries: we know it happened somewhere between them, not when. Those rows show the filing date, marked "date disclosed", and must not be read as the day of the trade.
• Portfolio returns are equal-weighted estimates. Since position sizes are not disclosed, we weight each listed holding equally. Real returns will differ — see how the equity curves are built.
• A holding is not a conflict. These are legally required, routine disclosures. The site reports what was filed; it does not allege wrongdoing.

How the equity curves are built

Every politician profile carries a one-year equity curve. It answers one narrow question — how did the listed securities on this person's disclosure perform? — and it is an estimate, not a statement of what anyone earned.

• Equal-weighted, because sizes are secret. Canadian disclosure names an asset and never its value, so there is no way to weight a basket properly. Each listed security counts the same, whether it is a token holding or the bulk of someone's savings.
• Spouse- and dependant-held securities are included. The filing covers the household, and we do not separate the curve by holder — a member whose disclosure is entirely their spouse's still has a curve, and it is their spouse's securities driving it. The Held by column on the holdings tab shows whose each one is. This matters most for ministers and parliamentary secretaries, whose own listed shares must be divested, so in practice their curve is a household one.
• Price return only — dividends are excluded. The curve is built from unadjusted weekly closing prices, so a dividend-heavy portfolio of banks and pipelines will look worse here than its real total return.
• Weekly points over a trailing year. We take the last close of each week (about 53 points). Anything that happened between two weekly closes is invisible.
• Sold positions stay in for the period they were held. Charting only what someone owns today would be survivorship bias — quietly deleting the losers. Where a notice of material change gives a real date, the position joins or leaves the basket on that date; a partial disposal trims a holding without removing it.
• Otherwise the position is in for the whole window. Most disclosures carry no transaction date at all, so we cannot know when a holding was bought or sold and do not guess. Holdings first disclosed since 1 August 2026 — when dated event tracking began — join the basket on their disclosure date, and markers on the chart show those changes.
• What it leaves out. Cash, private companies, real estate, funds that never resolve to a ticker, anything held in a blind trust, and every asset below the disclosure threshold. It is a curve of the disclosed listed slice, nothing more.

Taken together: treat these curves as a rough index of what a disclosure names, not as anyone's portfolio performance. A member could hold ten times more of their worst position than their best and the curve would never show it.

Ministers, parliamentary secretaries and blind trusts

Not every member is under the same rule, and the difference changes how these pages should be read.

• Backbench MPs fall under the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons. They may own publicly traded shares. They file a confidential statement, and the Commissioner publishes a Disclosure Summary naming each asset.
• Ministers and parliamentary secretaries are reporting public office holders under the Conflict of Interest Act. Publicly traded shares are controlled assets: within 120 days of appointment they must be sold or placed in a blind trust. A minister generally cannot simply continue to hold them.
• A blind trust is administered at arm's length. The office holder cannot see or direct what is inside it, and its contents are not published — so we can show that one exists, never what it contains.
• A spouse's holdings are not divested. The divestment rule binds the office holder, not the household. Spouses' and dependants' assets are disclosed in the same filing and stay in place, which is why the listed securities shown on a minister's profile are usually a spouse's. We label the holder on every row and never attribute a spouse's holding to the member.
• Exempt assets — mutual funds, many registered accounts, and similar pooled vehicles — may lawfully be held directly by an office holder, so a "self" row on a minister's profile is not a contradiction.

Measured across the current House: no sitting minister or parliamentary secretary personally holds a listed security. Every one of the listed holdings in their disclosures is held by a spouse. Among other MPs, most are held personally. That contrast is the divestment rule working, not evidence of anything improper.

Cabinet changes, so these labels change too. Ministry and parliamentary-secretary appointments are re-read from the House of Commons roles feed on a rolling schedule, with the start and end date of every post recorded, so a profile reflects the office a member holds now rather than the one they held when the page was written.

Known gaps, stated plainly

• Three jurisdictions are not covered. Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and Nunavut do not publish member disclosures in a form that can be read systematically, so provincial coverage is incomplete by their choice, not ours.
• SEDI and Elections Canada have no per-record links. Both are search systems whose result pages are session-based and cannot be linked to directly. Those rows link to the registry instead.
• A few older lobbying rows show a missing accented letter. An early import lost some accented characters; almost all of them have been restored, and 74 rows out of about 381,000 still show a replacement mark. New rows are unaffected.
• Small donors are invisible by law. A contributor whose yearly total to a recipient stays at $200 or less is never named in the public record, so no donor list anywhere is complete. See What the donation records leave out above.
• Company logos are illustrative. They come from public sources and some organizations have none. A missing logo means nothing about the organization.

Sources, licences and automation

• Government open data. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
• Lobbying. Contains information licensed under the Open Data Licence Agreement — Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying.
• No endorsement. Insider trades are read from filings published on SEDI, and politicians' disclosures from the public registries named above. No government body, regulator, legislature or registry endorses Insider Express, and nothing here is an official record: the source filing is.
• Market data is third-party and delayed. Quotes, sectors and company descriptions come from third-party providers and are delayed by at least 15 minutes; charts are provided by TradingView. They are for reference, not for trading.
• Reports are automated. Stories and alerts are written from filings by templates, without a person reviewing each one. Automated tools, including AI models, help match names in disclosures to companies and tickers. Both can make mistakes; the linked filing is the authority.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with the filing it links to, the filing is right and we want to know. Follow the source ↗ link on the row, then tell us what you found — include the link so it can be checked in one step.