Introducing PolitiData — An API for Canadian Political Financing & Lobbying Data

Canadian political financing and lobbying data is publicly available — Elections Canada publishes every contribution, and the Commissioner of Lobbying maintains a registry of every registered lobbyist and their communications with public office holders. But accessing this data programmatically has always been difficult: bulk CSV downloads, relational ZIP archives, inconsistent formatting, and no real API.

PolitiData changes that.

What PolitiData does

PolitiData is a REST API that normalizes Canadian political financing and lobbying data into a clean, queryable format. Three entity types, one API:

• Contributions (6.46M+ records, from 2004): every political donation reported to Elections Canada — contributor name, party, amount, electoral district, province, and contributor type
• Registrations (135K+ records): lobbying registrations filed with the Commissioner of Lobbying — client organizations, registered lobbyists, subject matters, and government institutions
• Communications (355K+ records): logged meetings and calls between registered lobbyists and designated public office holders (DPOHs) — who met whom, when, and on what subject

Together, that's over 6.9 million records spanning two decades of Canadian political activity.

Key features

• Rich filtering: search contributions by party, province, contributor type, and value range. Search lobbying data by client organization, lobbyist name, subject matter, and government institution
• Profile endpoints: look up any contributor by name to see their full donation history, or any client organization to see their lobbying activity
• Stats endpoint: aggregate contributions by party, province, or time period. Understand fundraising trends at a glance
• Bilingual data: lobbying records preserve both English and French fields — client_org_en, client_org_fr
• Weekly updates: automated pipelines pull fresh data from Elections Canada and the Lobbying Commissioner every week

Who it's for

PolitiData is built for developers and organizations working in:

• Investigative journalism: track donation patterns, cross-reference contributors with lobbying activity, surface connections between money and policy influence
• Political research: analyse fundraising trends by party, province, or time period across 20 years of data. Study the relationship between lobbying intensity and policy outcomes
• Government relations: monitor lobbying activity by subject matter and institution. Track which organizations are engaging with which departments
• Civic transparency: build public dashboards showing who funds Canadian politics and who lobbies government. Make accountability data accessible

The data behind the numbers

Some things you can find in PolitiData right now:

• Which parties receive the most individual donations, and from which provinces
• The top lobbying client organizations by number of communications with government
• Which government institutions are most frequently lobbied, and on what subjects
• How political contribution patterns shift around election years
• Which designated public office holders meet with lobbyists most frequently

All of this is queryable through a simple REST API with JSON responses.

Get started

PolitiData is available on RapidAPI with a free tier (100 requests/day). No credit card required.