Thirteen months past the filing deadline, Elections Canada’s public register of third-party financing for the April 2025 federal election still shows no final campaign return for three of the 109 outside groups that registered to spend money on the campaign.
The register, whose page carries a Sept. 14, 2026 modification date, lists an electoral campaign return for 106 of those groups. Three rows are empty: Canada Strong and Proud, which also registered under the name Proud To Be Canadian; the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, a union representing federal public servants; and SmartVoting.ca. Elections Canada states on the same page that every registered third party must file the return, form EC 20228, within four months of election day, which set the deadline at Aug. 28, 2025.
Two of the three have nothing on the register at all, neither an interim return nor a final one. Registration is itself triggered by $500 or more in regulated activity during an election period, so each of the three had told the agency it was spending money to influence the vote.
Canada Strong and Proud’s file is the fullest of the three and, in a different way, the emptiest. The group filed the interim return due seven days before the vote but not the one due 21 days before, even though Elections Canada’s instructions on the same page say a third party required to file the first must also file the second. The document it did file, signed April 21, 2025, by financial agent Robert Plante and registration applicant Susan Burrows, reports $3,925.72 in contributions from 42 individuals, only $750 of it from the two donors named in the filing, and $2,035.92 in partisan activity expenses.
That expense schedule lists almost nothing but payments to regionally branded affiliates: Alberta Proud, Ontario Strong, West Coast Proud, Manitoba Strong, Saskatchewan Proud, Quebec Fier, Quebec Proud, Nova Scotia Proud, Newfoundland Strong, Proudly New Brunswick and Fierement Nouveau-Brunswick. None of those 11 names appears anywhere else on the register of third parties for the 2025 election, which left the final return as the only place the network’s campaign spending would have been publicly accounted for.
The Investigative Journalism Foundation reported in February, in a story also published by The Tyee, that Elections Canada had granted Canada Strong and Proud an extension to Sept. 29, 2025, and that the return had not arrived by that date. Drawing on Meta’s ad library, the IJF calculated the group spent between $212,600 and $290,782 on Facebook and Instagram advertising during the regulated campaign period, and as much as $581,044 on Meta ads across all of 2025. Seven months after that story, the register still shows no return.
The Commissioner of Canada Elections’ annual report for 2025-26, published in July, shows how long such a gap can stay open. Elections Canada referred 1,533 files to the commissioner during the fiscal year, 1,362 of them involving political financing. Of the 47 complaints the office received during the election about third parties failing to register, 27 files were still open on March 31, 2026. Of 72 complaints about third parties failing to identify themselves in advertising, 35 were still open. The report says that because of timelines set out in the Canada Elections Act, some referrals do not reach the office until several years after an election, and that when formal measures do follow, “information about those measures may not be published until many years after the election.”
The office published 87 administrative monetary penalties, three criminal charges and six undertakings over the year. Baseline penalties for third-party and political financing violations range from $50 to a maximum of $1,500 for an individual and $5,000 for a corporation or other entity.
Elections Canada posts returns as it receives and processes them, so a blank row on the register is not by itself proof that a document was never filed, and no published enforcement measure names any of the three groups. The privacy notice printed on the return form itself is blunter about what is at stake: “Failure to provide the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) with the Return is considered to be an offence under the Act.”
