Oil giants lobbying the federal government got $2.6 billion in taxpayer dollars over the past 11 years. That figure comes from self-reported data filed by 11 of the country's largest oil and gas players in the federal lobbying registry, a joint investigation by the Investigative Journalism Foundation and Canada’s National Observer has found. Federal lobbying rules require companies that lobby to report how much money they were awarded by each level of government.

Our investigation reveals more than $951 million of the money paid to the 11 companies we tracked came from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). The CRA wouldn’t reveal exactly what these funds were for, citing privacy reasons. However, Canada’s National Observer previously reported more than $1.3 billion was granted to all oil and gas companies by the CRA through the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. Similar subsidies were provided to many Canadian companies across all sectors during the first two years of the pandemic.