Every day, the IJF checks elections agency websites at the federal level and in each province and territory for new political donations data. Historical data comes from a variety of government sources including provincial archives, legislative libraries and elections agencies. We have data from 1993 to the present day, however that time range varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Donations disclosure
Political parties and/or candidates at the federal and provincial/territorial levels are legally required to submit records of donations. Elections agencies maintain these records and make them publicly accessible. The frequency of disclosure as to when parties and/or candidates are required to file returns and for which electoral events varies by jurisdiction. For example, some jurisdictions require quarterly returns while others require annual.
Recipients of political donations include parties, party leadership contestants, riding associations (also called electoral district or constituency associations) and riding candidates. Records of donations to these political entities may be collected in one report or multiple reports by recipient, time period, or electoral event.
Donation laws
The following table shows the contribution limits and types of entities who can donate in each jurisdiction.
Data collection
The IJF team collected data for the federal government as well as all 13 provinces and territories. We also collect city-specific donations from Victoria and Vancouver. The following table shows the source of the donations records by jurisdiction, the format of the records, the time period and the type of recipients that receive donations.
Data cleaning
Converting data from PDFs
For records that were only available as PDFs, we converted them into CSV files using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. We used a combination of OCR tools including: Adobe Export PDF, Cometdocs and ABBYY FineReader.
Extensive manual cleaning was done for all OCRed returns in order to correct any errors arising from the OCR scanning. For instance, if the OCR software read in all $ as S or 5, this was manually corrected by the IJF through a close examination of the OCR-output machine-readable documents against the original raw files from the elections agency.
Standardizing and amalgamating values
The IJF team cleaned and standardized multiple columns in the donations database where possible and where it would make the data more legible to users. For example, as many donor names as possible were standardized to “First name last name” instead of “Last name, first name”. Similarly, most date columns were standardized to the YYYY-MM-DD format.
Other cleaning choices included changing abbreviated party names in Quebec (e.g. P.Q. , C.A.Q.- É.F.L. , Q.S.) to their full names, and standardizing the donor type column so categories like “Business” and “Unincorporated Business or Commercial Organization” and “Corporation” were merged into a single “Corporation” category.
In many cases where donor type columns were empty and where laws stated that only individuals could donate (ex. Ontario after 2017), the IJF team added “Individual” to the column.
Party names in each jurisdiction were also standardized as much as possible. For example, in the Nova Scotia donations, “Progressive Conservative”, “Progressive Conservative Party of Nova Scotia”, “The Progressive Conservative Association of Nova Scotia” and “Progressive Conservatives” were changed to the official party name, “Progressive Conservative Association of Nova Scotia.”
Limitations
Where the IJF was confident a typo was an error, we made changes. For example, political parties occasionally misspell their own names or the name of their province. Outside of those errors though the IJF left the data as is.
Another potential challenge was the level of scrutiny of the records from election officials.
Minor typos are not uncommon and appear as submitted by the political entity, and financial records may have been inaccurately reported. Some jurisdictions request receipts for every donation. Others require an auditor or financial agent to sign off on the accuracy of the records. Some elections agencies, like Elections Canada, audit some of the donations records, but not all.
If there are typos in original donation records, these will appear in the database. Variations or misspellings of recipient names or donor names are due to typos in the raw data.
Records obtained through OCR technology may contain errors, especially handwritten records. For example, an “e” could be read as an “a” depending on someone’s handwriting. Records where OCR tools consistently struggled, such as the handwritten returns from Nunavut, were all manually verified by IJF staff to ensure accuracy.