Why Provenance Matters
When a journalist traces a contract win, a researcher audits a lobbying interaction, or an AI agent answers a question about government spending — every result needs to trace back to an authoritative source. Third-party data aggregators introduce opacity: you inherit their collection methodology, their errors, and their refresh latency without visibility into any of it. Our architecture eliminates that layer entirely. You get a direct, auditable path from government source to API response.Data Sources
Federal Contracts & Disclosures
All federal contract and proactive disclosure records are sourced directly from the CanadaBuys open data portal and the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) Proactive Disclosure CKAN API (open.canada.ca). We ingest from the official government open data endpoints on a weekly cycle.
Sources: CanadaBuys, TBS / open.canada.ca CKAN API
Federal Grants & Contributions
Federal grants are sourced directly from the TBS Proactive Disclosure CKAN datastore — the same system that powers open.canada.ca. We page the full dataset on each quarterly refresh and upsert by grant key. Source: TBS / open.canada.ca — resource1d15a62f-5656-49ad-8c88-f40ce689d831
Lobbying
Lobbying registrations and communications are sourced directly from the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying (LobbyCan) via their official registry export files. We ingest one row per communication keyed by the LobbyCancom_id — no entity multiplication, no deduplication guesswork.
Source: Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying — lobbycanada.gc.ca
Political Contributions
Contribution data is sourced directly from Elections Canada’s reviewed contributions dataset, published as official ZIP exports. We hash each normalized row and skip exact duplicates present in the source exports. Source: Elections Canada reviewed contributions — elections.caResearch Grants
NSERC and SSHRC research award data is sourced directly from their respective open data portals, published as annual award CSV files. NSERC coverage spans 1991 to present; SSHRC spans 1998 to present. Sources: NSERC open data, SSHRC open dataInfrastructure Projects
Infrastructure Canada project data is sourced directly from their bilingual project list, published on the open.canada.ca portal. The bilingual CSV includes French and English fields for project title, program, location, and recipient. Source: Infrastructure Canada — open.canada.caParliamentary Data
Parliamentary data — bills, politicians, elected member history, committee memberships, votes, and Hansard statements — is sourced directly from the OpenParliament public API, which normalizes House of Commons data into a structured, queryable format. Source: OpenParliament API — openparliament.caBuilding Permits
Municipal permit data is sourced directly from 17 municipal open data portals. Each city publishes through one of four portal types: Socrata, CKAN, ArcGIS Feature Service, or Opendatasoft. For cities that do not publish native coordinates, we geocode addresses against the Statistics Canada Open Database of Addresses (ODA) — an open-licence reference dataset of ~10M civic addresses. Sources: 17 municipal open data portals; Statistics Canada ODA for geocodingNo Third-Party Dependencies
Our data pipeline has zero third-party data vendor dependencies. This means:- Full auditability — every record traces to a named primary government source
- No redistribution risk — all source data is published under open government licences
- Controlled latency — we own the entire ingestion path; refresh schedules are documented and within our control
- Single point of accountability — if something is wrong with the data, the fix starts here