Canadian governments have a transparency problem.
It’s not just us at On the Trail who think this. The IJF just released a fantastic report on this Monday. Justin Ling released a great piece about it last week. I’ve been yelling about this for the better part of two years now. Aedan has dug into the foundations of the broken transparency of Canada. Dónal Gill and I have yelled about it at Canadian Dimension.
Canadian governments are often legally bound to release forms that detail their assets, investments, and possessions that could become conflicts of interest in their time serving as public employees.
These systems are broken, hard to access, and more or less useless for most people. Even from a technical perspective, there are few API's, fewer archives, no consistent release schedules, no consistent data structures and no email lists or RSS feeds.
The only consistency is the lack of it.
This isn’t really an opinion— anyone who has to use these websites regularly (journalists, for example) are subjected to look at them and become acquainted with their antiquated tools and UI that, admittedly, has improved as of late.
Aedan and I had a meeting with someone recently, whose entire job is looking at Lobbyist data. We laughed endlessly at how terrible the system is, and that their entire job was to suffer by looking at the website. Here, go ahead and give it a try. It’s quite exhausting. Even worse is the conflict of interest website for the feds. Entire provinces don’t have this data available at all, the eastern provinces are particularly egregious.
In order for Aedan and I to access the Conflict Of Interest disclosures in Newfoundland we must go there in person and hope that the ethics commissioner is in a good enough mood to show us the papers. We are not allowed to scan these files, or leave with them because Anne Chafe, the interim commissioner for legislative standards, thinks it’s dangerous to have things on the internet.
We fixed the problem.
Well, we at On the Trail have been secretly working on a fix for this for a long time now. Aedan has designed, from the ground up, a system that automatically pulls together information for every elected official in the federal or provincial government and presents the following info:
Stock Performance
Donors
Lobbying
Assets
Gifted Travel
Liabilities
Alternative Sources of Income
Contact Information
We have designed the system to generate the charts of the stock performances of any who has stocks declared (Federal officials must have stocks declared if they own over $10,000 of any stock, for provinces this threshold varies). MPs have a much higher than average stock performance.
We possess this information about every single federal official. Aedan has written code to scrape different websites run by the government in order to present normal people with the capability to hold their local representatives accountable —without having to beat their heads against the wall that is government website design.
Design that is, by the way, purposefully obtuse.
Existing tools are lacking. There are good databanks, but few are easily usable by normal people, people who aren’t going in with a purpose and a pre-determined goal.
Do one better
We did one better than that though. Not only did we make all of this available right now for you to go look at, you can also search organizations in our system that have contractual or lobbying relationships with any government in Canada. You can search them by a variety of attributes – and the search feature is able to capture many of the different spellings and aliases used by the people in the government. A good example is Garda World, whom we wrote about recently. It is referred to by many different names in government records. Some of them are just misspellings, left completely uncorrected by government employees.
There is no other political database in existence in Canada that can perform entity resolution to this level of efficacy - the process of recognizing two distinct database entries as referring to the same thing. This allows us to present an entirely new level of information about how various organizations interact with Canadian governments. The comprehensive nature of this database is unlike any that has ever been built in Canada.
But this is just the beginning.
This is version 0.01 of the database. We dug into On the Trail’s highly limited bank account and paid Aedan to design this.
Right now, only the Federal government and BC are fully available, but significant data is already present for other jurisdictions. We are aiming to build this out over the next five months. This fall, we’re hoping to launch version 1.0 of this database, with every province fully built in the system as much as possible. On the Trail started with one goal: to be a strange, diverse journalistic platform. We’ve been able to find our audience with a relentless focus on data backed work that focuses on accountability with the government.
This tool will revolutionize what we’re doing long term.
It is completely attached to subscribers here. Everyone has limited access to the database, with assets, portfolios, and conflicts of interest available to all people, as well as donors and contracts related to lobbying. Meanwhile, the data on stocks, and lobbying itself are available to all people paying $20 or more. We might change it later, but the purpose for this is to help us develop the system further. It will take months to fully implement the system and make it as comprehensive as we need, and it will take repeated effort to ascertain the information that the eastern provinces don’t freely provide.
FUN SIDE NOTE: Anyone who gets a 1 year subscription to the $20 or higher tier will get a free t-shirt with their subscription!
For those of you who have recently already paid this, I am getting to it this week! I am sorry that it took so long. It’s been a big deal setting all this up. You can even order merch à la carte now!
In order to support Aedan in the development of this project and correcting Canada’s serious problem with accountability, we need help. Subscribers of $20 or more will be divided between Aedan and I, incentivizing his exceptional work on the database. Meanwhile, those who subscribe at lower tiers are (hopefully) helping me to save the money to pay him for his work. Long term, this will be further integrated into our journalism.
For now, the beta is available to everyone on the website. Simply click the tab at the top that says “Data Trail beta” or click this link to look at it yourself.
Thank you for your help in growing this project. We are hoping to revolutionize the country and government accountability with this robust tool.