What is this?

Governments publish a great deal of spending data, but it is scattered across hundreds of PDFs, spreadsheets and web pages that few people have time to read. This prototype gathers 161,865 of those records in one place and tries to make the amounts easier to picture. It gathers provincial contract awards, minister and MHA expenses, public sector pay over $100,000, department and program spending, federal contracts, grants and transfers in the province, and the payment registers two municipalities publish.

How far to trust the figures

• Every record comes from a published government source, and each one links back to the file and page or row it came from.
• The records are read, cleaned and combined by automated scripts. Reading PDFs and scanned images can introduce errors, and combining sources means deciding how to avoid counting the same money twice. Those decisions are written down on the Methods page.
• The figures have not been independently vetted. Totals are checked against the totals the sources print, and a sample of records has been traced back to the originals, but that is not an audit.
• Before relying on a figure, open its source.

What it is not

• It is not an audit, a news report or an official publication.
• It makes no accusations. The patterns it shows are questions people ask about public spending, counted from the records. Each has its method written down, and none is evidence that anything wrong happened.
• It is not affiliated with any government, party or campaign.

Status

This is a prototype. The name, the scope and the sources will change, and parts of it may be wrong. Mistakes that are found are listed on the Corrections page. Data was last gathered on Sept. 29, 2026.