Elections Canada’s reviewed donation file has no 2024 rows for the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP or Greens, and the agency says that can be normal

Elections Canada’s “as reviewed” political-contributions file contains no 2024 contribution records for six federal parties, including the Conservative, Liberal, New Democratic and Green parties, even though the same file holds more than 390,000 rows for those parties for 2023. The agency says that is expected at this stage, and that the full 2024 data is published in a different file.

We downloaded the contributions file from elections.ca on Nov. 7, 2026, and counted rows by party and fiscal year. For 2023 the file has 151,202 rows for the Conservative Party of Canada, 129,250 for the Liberal Party of Canada, 86,602 for the New Democratic Party, 24,550 for the Green Party of Canada, 2,475 for the Christian Heritage Party and 2,270 for the People’s Party of Canada. For 2024 each of those six parties has zero rows. Other parties do appear for 2024, among them the Bloc Québécois (4,146 rows), the Communist Party (707) and the Animal Protection Party (526). No party has any rows for 2025.

Elections Canada’s media relations office answered all four of our questions on Nov. 13, before the 5 p.m. ET deadline we gave. It confirmed that the audits of the parties’ 2024 annual returns are ongoing and said how long they take “will vary depending on various factors, such as the number of contributions and the time to resolve questions with political parties.”

It also said the gap may not close even when the audits finish. The “as reviewed” file is populated only with contribution data from returns that were updated by the political entity or by Elections Canada, and if a return has no changes its data does not appear there. “It is still possible that some parties will have no rows” in that file, the agency said.

The agency said the 2024 annual returns for all parties, as submitted, are published on its website, and that the 2024 contribution data for all parties as submitted can be downloaded from its open data page. The full data set from January 2004 to the present must be downloaded and then filtered by party and year. The 2025 returns, which were due June 30, 2026, are also already available as submitted, it said, and the reviewed data will follow as returns are updated.

On whether the public can tell what each file contains, the agency said no published schedule lists which returns are in the as-submitted or as-reviewed data sets, and that a list of included returns “must be extracted from the data sets themselves.” It described as-submitted data as published once a return is confirmed complete, usually shortly after it is filed, and as-reviewed data as published when an entity or the agency updates a return, on a timeline that “can vary widely.”

The records do not show that any donations are missing or that anything was hidden. They show that the file most often used to study party financing, the one labelled “as reviewed,” can be silent about the largest parties for a whole year without any note saying why. A researcher or reporter who counts donors or dollars from that file alone would wrongly conclude that the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Greens received no money in 2024. Readers who want the full picture should use the as-submitted file, and treat any year-over-year comparison in the reviewed file with care.

How we checked: We downloaded the as-reviewed contributions file (6,271,518 rows) on Nov. 7, 2026 and counted rows by party and fiscal year. We did not independently download or audit the as-submitted file. We sent Elections Canada written questions about the gap and gave it until 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 13 to respond. We are not alleging wrongdoing by Elections Canada or any party.

Edited by Harry Miller.