Lobbying registry lists $20-billion grant to art gallery foundation

Canada’s public lobbying registry lists a $20-billion federal grant to an Ontario art gallery foundation and a $3.2-billion federal grant to a charity whose earlier filings put the same funding at $3.2 million, figures that appear to be data-entry errors the registry publishes without checking.

The amounts are in the government-funding section of lobbying registrations, where organizations that lobby the federal government must declare public money they received or expect. The registry’s open data, downloaded by Canada News Media on Nov. 3, holds 220,350 funding entries across 178,407 registration versions. Of those entries, 127 list a single amount of $1 billion or more.

Some of the large figures are plausible. General Motors of Canada’s registrations from 2010 list $10.6 billion from Export Development Canada, the period of the auto-sector rescue, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation reported billions from the Government of Canada, which funds it.

Others are not. A registration for the McMichael Canadian Art Foundation, which raises money for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., posted July 2, 2025, lists $20,000,000,000 expected from Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, next to $50 million from Ontario’s tourism and culture ministry and $5 million from Canadian Heritage. The foundation’s earlier registrations listed Canadian Heritage funding of $252,000 to $381,442.

The Rideau Hall Foundation’s registration effective Jan. 15, 2026 lists $3,156,465,000 from Employment and Social Development Canada. Its two earlier versions, from March and July 2025, list $3,167,537 from the same department, about one-thousandth of the newer figure.

Entos Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company, has registrations from late 2021 and 2022 that list $10 billion expected from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. A parallel Entos registration filed the same day, Nov. 22, 2021, lists $10 million from that department, and earlier versions listed $2 billion.

The registry also shows smaller inconsistencies. Nine registration versions have an end date before their start date, and 27 versions that answer “no” to the question of whether the organization receives government funding still list funding amounts.

The figures are entered by the registrants themselves. Nothing in the records suggests any organization received or claimed the amounts as written, and the most likely explanation in each case is a slip such as entering an amount in thousands, or adding extra zeros. The issue is that the official, searchable record continues to show them, and anyone adding up the government funding reported by lobbyists would be off by tens of billions of dollars.

Canada News Media sent questions to the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying on Nov. 3, asking whether the registry checks the amounts registrants enter and whether it corrects figures that are clearly implausible. The office had not responded by the deadline, 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 6. Canada News Media will also ask the McMichael Canadian Art Foundation, the Rideau Hall Foundation and Entos Pharmaceuticals to confirm the correct amounts, and will update this story with any response.

What it means for you

The lobbying registry is one of the main tools Canadians, reporters and MPs use to see who is trying to influence Ottawa and how much public money those groups already receive. Totals or rankings built from its funding field should be checked against the departments’ own grants and contributions records before they are relied on.

How we did this. Canada News Media downloaded the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying’s registrations open data file on Nov. 3, 2026, loaded all 178,407 registration versions and 220,350 government-funding rows, and searched for amounts of $1 billion or more, for amounts that jump by about 1,000 times between versions of the same registration, for end dates before start dates, and for funding rows on registrations that answer “no” to government funding. We have not yet compared the amounts with the departments’ grants and contributions disclosures.

Source: Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, registrations open data file.

With reporting by a Canada News Media contributor.

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