Elections Canada open data lists donations dated as late as the year 4002

Elections Canada’s public political-financing data includes 62 contribution records whose received dates cannot be real, among them a donation dated June 15, 4002 and another dated April 7, 0025, according to a review of the agency’s own open data file.

The records total $19,756.77. Fifty-three are dated after Oct. 31, 2026, with years running from 2026 to 4002, and nine are dated before 1990, with years such as 0025, 0150 and 1111. The file has 6,271,270 rows, so the 62 records are about 0.001 per cent of it. Each affected return also lists a plausible fiscal or election date, which suggests the received date was mistyped or mangled, not that the money arrived in a different century.

The records appear in candidate returns and in registered electoral district association returns going back to 2014. We have not named any donor or recipient because the point is the quality of the public file, not the people in it.

What Elections Canada said

Elections Canada media relations replied on Nov. 10, before the 5 p.m. ET deadline we gave. It said the file’s “As submitted” data is contribution data as originally reported by political entities, while the “As reviewed” data only includes returns that were later updated by the entity or the agency, so a complete picture can require reading both sets in parallel.

The agency said it assesses all financial returns but does not audit all of them, and that corrections are made only in returns selected for a compliance audit, not every line of the return. On the dates, it said odd years are often a result of the age of its reporting system, which required only two digits for the year, and that the downloaded file tries to convert a two-digit year to four digits, which can produce an odd format. Once a file is closed, it said, it would not ask an entity to go back to old returns and supply a four-digit year.

Elections Canada added that its newer electronic filing software blocks wrongly formatted or invalid contribution dates, that there is no data dictionary for the open data, and that it is willing to explain individual fields to researchers.

What this means

The records are not evidence of improper donations. They show that an official file used to study party and candidate financing contains dates that do not pass a basic sanity check, and that a user who sorts or filters by date can get wrong results unless they know to look for them. Journalists, researchers and parties that rely on the file should treat the received-date field with care, and Elections Canada’s explanation suggests the problem is a legacy of older systems, not a recent failure.

How we checked

We downloaded the contributions file from elections.ca on Nov. 1, 2026 (file dated Oct. 30, 2026) and counted rows whose received date was later than Oct. 31, 2026 or earlier than Jan. 1, 1990. We asked Elections Canada about the records on Nov. 6 and published after the deadline of Nov. 10, 5 p.m. ET. A second request about 2024 contributions for six parties missing from the file is still open and will be reported separately.

Edited by Harry Miller.