Methodology
Data sources
Every number on this site comes from official Government of Canada open data, and every record links back to its source:
- Grants & contributions — the proactive-disclosure dataset on open.canada.ca, imported weekly.
- International assistance — Global Affairs Canada's IATI publications, imported weekly.
- Economic indicators — Statistics Canada Web Data Service (CPI, housing, wages, population, GDP), imported weekly. Each chart cites its StatCan table.
What we add
Categories and plain-English summaries on spending records are generated by an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) from the published description only, and are always labelled as such. Low-confidence categorizations are reviewed by a human. Community tags are applied by registered readers — not by this site — and suggested tags are moderated before appearing.
What we never do
We do not editorialize, alter official figures, or rank spending as good or bad. Purpose fields in the source data are inconsistent; our summaries are always "based on the published description".
Update cadence
Spending imports run weekly; statistics imports run weekly; sitemaps regenerate nightly.
Who runs this site
OttawaSpends is an independent, free public-interest project built and maintained by Braunson Yager, a Canadian software developer. It is not affiliated with the Government of Canada or any political party, accepts no advertising, and exists to make official spending data readable by anyone.
Corrections
Spotted an error? Use the correction form. We review every request, fix what we got wrong, and note material corrections here.