*Per Sarah Scire

“Think of us as ProPublica discovering OpenSecrets.” That’s the editor-in-chief Zane Schwartz describes the newly launched Investigative Journalism Foundation Canada (IJF).

A stub non-partisan, non-profit news outlet “expanding the reach, depth, and financial sustainability of long-term investigative journalism in Canada” build public interest databases, collaborate with other newsrooms, and publish their own investigations.

A week after the launch, IJF featured several political figures broke their party’s promise to stop allowing lobbyists to participate in fundraisers to gain accessgive investigated the country’s public housing system in partnership with The Walrus and cataloged, with the National Observer, lobbying attacks by Canada’s largest oil and gas group.

The IJF’s mission is quite simple. They hope to follow the money – and leave the door open for other journalists. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to compile this amount of data into a usable, searchable database.

In the United States, public records can be frustrating to access and analyze, with information hidden on federal, state, county, and local websites. Schwartz said journalists faced a similar situation in Canada.

“Before [do lançamento]all of this data is required by law to be published, but you may actually need to open government archives to access it.”said Schwarz. “You definitely have to go to a government website where the data will be stored, say, alphabetically by politician’s name. Very simple things like, ‘Who is the biggest giver?’ or ‘How many people donated to party x in year y?’ nearly impossible to answer.”

The IJF Team (and more than 80 volunteers) spent 2 years collecting, cleaning and analyzing nearly 9 million rows of data from government websites so they could launch 8 public interest databases:

• Lobby Logs: we have data on the laws lobbyists want to change and the government funding they’re asking for at the federal and provincial levels. Users will be able to search by lobbyist names and keywords (e.g. electric school buses, pipelines, solar panels, wealth inequality, etc.);
• turnstile: any lobbyist working for the government at the federal level and in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and British Columbia. Users can search by company (eg Suncor or TD Bank), by department (eg Environment, Finance) or by individual lobbyist name;
• Lobbyist meeting: which lobbyists met with which politicians;
• Government funding: all monies received by lobbyists from provincial, territorial, municipal, federal and international governments. Users can search by company, dollar amount, and government program;
• Political Donations: all donations to politicians at the federal level and in all provinces and territories from 1993 to the present. Users can search by donor name and recipient name. They can also narrow their search by location, number, political party and type of donor (eg union, corporation, individual);
• Charity tax returns: tax returns for all Canadian charities from 1990 to present, searchable by income, expenses, and interest program. Users can compare charities on revenue increase or expense to income ratio;
• Subsidy Recipients: how much money the foundation contributes to each charity they support. Users can search by donor, recipient, number, region, and field of study (eg highest funder to environmental charities, highest funder to poverty alleviation charities, etc.);
• Charity Employee Salary: salaries vary for senior charity workers from time to time. It will show you how much the highest paid employees earn.

IJF currently has 12 person team, including 8 permanent employees. Journalists, developers and editors are spread across the country – although IJF recently started renting office space. work colleague a few days a week in Toronto, where about half the team lives.

Prior to launch, Schwartz worked on National Post, Maclean’s, Logic He calgary herald. He currently serves as the national president of the Association of Canadian Journalists (voluntary position) and launches annual diversity survey from that organization.

On a post preface, Schwartz wrote that Canada lost hundreds of media He thousands of jobs in journalism full-time for the past 15 years. The total number of newspaper articles published annually has fallen by half. HI the number of articles on civil affairs was reduced by a third.

To help media outlets that are short on resources, IJF wants to make it available reporting power – along with data – to partner publications. “We don’t just say, ‘Here is the database.’ We assigned a reporter, they assigned a reporter, and they worked together to dig deep.”said Schwartz.

Since 2021, nonprofits have been on the rise almost 800,000 Canadian dollars (about R$ 304 thousand) from 10 donors.

“I’m very grateful to the funders we have because they fund an idea, right? We went to them and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Canadians could see who their politicians’ biggest donors are?’”said Schwartz. “And they said, ‘Yeah, that would be great. Let me give you the money to go out and make it happen.’

Still, Schwartz hopes to grow additional revenue streams, starting with reader support. “I would be much more comfortable if we had more funders”, he says. “You never want to be in a position where there is a potential conflict of interest.”

Although the database is free for “simple survey”, IJF also plans to sell access to the data. Organization “those who want to make money from the database” and those who are interested in complex quests or real time alerts will pay the subscription fee. You 4 subscription packages costs between CA$10 (R$38) and CA$60 (R$228) per month.

Looking to the future, IJF wants to build more databases of interest to journalists and the public, including compiling financial disclosure forms (including shareholdings) filed by politicians. And as more journalists discover his free resources, Schwartz also hopes to uncover more of the stories hidden in data by partnering with local reporters.

“We know we don’t know everything about Canada”said Schwartz. “There were reporters all over the country who would see a name and say, ‘Oh, that’s a big real estate developer in my town. The fact that they donate is very significant.’ Then they can use that data to ask targeted questions.”

*Sarah Scire is deputy editor at Nieman Lab. Previously, he worked at Tow Center for Digital Journalism on Columbia University, party, Straus and Giroux and no The New York Times.

Text translated by Eduarda Teixeira. Read the original text at English.

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