About Follow the Grant
What is this site?
Follow the Grant is a transparency tool that makes every federal government grant and contribution in Canada searchable, shareable, and understandable. The Government of Canada publishes this data as open data, but the official portal is unintuitive. Follow the Grant takes the same data and presents it in a way that lets any Canadian see exactly where their tax dollars are going, organized by riding, recipient, and department.
Data Sources
Primary source: Open Government Portal. This dataset contains every grant and contribution awarded by federal departments and agencies, updated quarterly.
MP data: Member of Parliament names and party affiliations are sourced from ourcommons.ca Open Data, covering the 42nd through 45th Parliaments.
How Riding Assignment Works
[REVISE] The grants data does not include riding names. We derive them from the recipient's city and province by cross-referencing Elections Canada data. Cities that span multiple ridings (e.g. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) are flagged where an unambiguous match isn't possible. This means some grants, particularly in large metro areas, may be attributed to a general metro area rather than a specific riding.
The “Eyebrow-Raiser” Ranking
Grants on the homepage “Eyebrow-Raisers” section are ranked by an internal scoring algorithm that weights several factors: dollar amount relative to the department median, proximity to a federal election, description keywords associated with public interest, and recipient type. This score is used purely for ranking and is not a judgment on whether a grant is wasteful or inappropriate.
Pre-Election Spending Analysis
The pre-election spike ratio compares average monthly grant spending in the 6 months before an election to the average monthly spending in the 12 months before that window. A ratio of 2.0x means spending doubled during the pre-election period. We analyze this pattern across federal elections in 2019, 2021, 2025.
Important: Correlation with election timing is not evidence of political motivation. Grant programs have their own funding cycles, and increases may reflect fiscal year-end patterns, policy announcements, or application backlogs.
Limitations
- [REVISE] Riding assignment is derived from city/province and may be imprecise for large metro areas with multiple ridings.
- The source data is updated quarterly and may lag behind actual grant disbursements by several months.
- Some departments may report inconsistently or change their data structures between releases.
- Per-capita comparisons rely on population data that is updated much less frequently than the grant data.
- The dataset does not include major federal-to-provincial funding, such as Equalization payments and the Canada Health and Social Transfers.
- The data only tracks the primary recipient. If an organization redistributes the grant money to third parties, the ultimate end-users are not reported.
- Certain grants and contributions are intentionally withheld from the public dataset to comply with the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.
Contact & Feedback
Found an error? Have a suggestion? Reach us by email: contact@followthegrant.ca