01Overview — what is in the box
Eight evidence layers joined on shared keys, all regenerable from open-data CSVs. Every section is one layer; every number traces to a report + CSV in the source repo.
02Money flows vs lobbying intensity
Atlantic Canada year by year. Lobbying moves on the registry; the money is what actually arrived. Toggle normalization to compare shapes, not scales.
The full overlay lead_lag.py · series_annual_atlantic.csv
Grant money tends to follow lobbying spikes by about two years — the numbers move together strongly (r=0.81; r=0.60 even after stripping the shared upward trend, so it is not just "everything grew"). It is a pattern, not proof: behind every grant sits an ordinary paperwork story on its face.
Where the Atlantic money sits
Federal dollars actually delivered, by channel.
Grants: $84.8B handed out (2005–2026) · Contracts: $33.65B awarded to Atlantic companies (21,003 deals) · University research: $2.92B · of which ACOA: $8.2B.
Lobbyist donors — who receives the money
Who ends up with the money: the party's central fund, the local riding association, or a candidate personally. This shows where donations landed — not what donors think.
$53.0M from 10,264 registered-lobbyist keys, 2004–2026 ·
rebuilt from the correct column 2026-10-31 (fixes in
analysis/corrections.md).
Gift timing — what officials-turned-lobbyists donate around exit donations_link.py · dn_crossover_timing.csv
286 officials-turned-lobbyists' donations, placed on a timeline of when they left office. Giving slows around leaving, then visibly clusters 1–2 years later — the shape of the new-job fundraising cycle. A pattern, not a charge.
03The revolving door
From "met" to "registered" to "on the ethics books" — each step a registry fact, none a charge.
1 · Government gets lobbied
Across 353,940 logged lobbying contacts, 25,582 government officials are named by name. 24% of registered lobbyists self-declare that they used to be a government official — mostly ex-House-of- Commons staff.
2 · Officials become lobbyists
1,235 officials later sign up as lobbyists; 624 did so within two years. Some pivots are astonishingly fast — one staffing-agency official had 164 lobbying contacts, then registered as a lobbyist 3 days after the last one.
3 · The circle closes
For 91 of those people, the organization they met while they were in office later shows up on their own lobby file — and 381 are double-checked against government paperwork.
Cooling-off exposure — appointments vs first registration oic_cooling.md
Out of 23,365 official appointment records, 844 of the appointees later turn up as registered lobbyists. Checking 431 of those handoffs closely: 183 started lobbying again within a year. All of it legal — this is the width of the lane, not a violation of any rule.
The speed of the door dpoh_lobbied.py · dl_office_verified.csvregistry-published facts
Each dot is one official who later registered as a lobbyist (381 in total). The scale spreads out small numbers so the fastest pivots are visible. Red band = registered within a month of leaving. Orange dots also contacted their old office after registering.
All of this is public in the lobbying registry — the chart only shows what the registry itself discloses. Hover any dot for the person, office, contact count and the clients they filed for.
04New Brunswick deep-dive
The home province through every layer: 158 registered clients, $15.64B in grants, $5.59B in contracts, $13.8M of riding donations.
NB officials under the ethics registry ethics_crawl.py · eth_nb.csvgroup B = office-linked, not residents
Group A = the 10 actual NB Members of Parliament (matched by riding). Group B = staff tied to ACOA / New Brunswick offices — they are linked, not necessarily residents. "Disc." = how many disclosure documents they filed (assets, debts like mortgages, sponsored travel, gifts). The ✓ columns flag same-name matches only — they are not identity confirmations.
NB donors by receiving party (top name keys) name-level
From the 6.27M-row Elections Canada file, NB-region keys with collision tiers (nb_deep.py).
NB's most-lobbied named officials nb_targets_dpoh.csv
Named government targets inside NB clients' contact logs.
05Case files: the two funding giants
NB-linked organizations whose money moves through channels the lobbying registry barely sees — with honest measure notes.
Medavie — the quiet contractor
$1.76B of federal contracts across just 13 references (2009–2025) while the lobbying footprint is one registration, zero communications, zero declared funding. A payment channel, not an influence channel.
VAC = Veterans Affairs treatment-benefit health-claims processing · IFHP = Interim Federal Health (IRCC) · DND = base paramedics via Medavie Health Services / EMT Inc.
Irving — the procurement whale
$15.76B of contracts across 220 awards with Irving-named suppliers — $14.7B of it shipbuilding. The comparison numbers are different measures, not a discrepancy: the registry reports advocacy; the contracts report the dollars.
Declared G&C (registry filings, received+expected, deduped) vs actual G&C receipts ARE comparable — both grants channel. The $15.76B belongs to procurement and must not be set against them (corrections.md).
06People & boards
CRA's charity-return open files list board members for all 83,727 registered charities (568,739 board seats, 2024 snapshot). We matched member names against lobbying/officials names — purely name-level, capped to rare names before anything is quotable.
Same-name matches only — and how careful we are with them common names collide nationally
A board seat is not evidence of lobbying. Common names like John Smith exist by the hundreds nationally — only rare-name matches are quotable; the NB table below shows exactly that rare subset.
NB charities connected by board members — the quotable subset charity_boards.py · cb_overlap_nb.csv
Only 162 of NB's 669 board-name matches are rare enough nationally to be quotable (2 or fewer people in the whole country share that name). Even then, verify with a second source before naming anyone.
Where research money lands (Atlantic top 8) university_money.md
From the three federal research agencies; Dal $1.35B leads the region, Memorial $0.51B, UNB $0.31B.
Bills that pull the most lobby registrations bills_lobby.py
The proposed laws that pull in the most lobbying paperwork.
07Networks — the connection graphs
Three node-link views, all fully interactive: drag nodes, scroll to zoom, drag background to pan, click a node to isolate its edges, type to search. Everything is name/registry-level data — hover for provenance.