Methodology & data sources

Where the data comes from

Every expense record on this site is taken from the Proactive Disclosure – Hospitality Expenses dataset that the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat publishes on open.canada.ca. Under sections 76 and 83 of the Access to Information Act, ministers and senior officials must publish their hospitality expenses — including the name of the commercial establishment and the municipality — within 30 days of the end of the month in which they were reimbursed. This site reproduces those disclosures; it never adds or alters a record.

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Read the licence. This is an independent site with no official status; it is not endorsed by the Government of Canada.

Scope

• Institution: Global Affairs Canada
• Roles: ambassadors, high commissioners, consuls general, heads of mission / chargés d'affaires and their deputies, identified from the disclosed title and labelled as such on every record
• Period: from 2019-01-01. Earlier records list the vendor only as "N/A" and cannot be mapped.

How vendor names are handled

The vendor field sometimes names a single restaurant, but for events at the official residence it often lists several grocers, florists and caterers. Each entry is split into its parts; the residence itself, caterers, suppliers and service providers are set aside, and only places a traveller could actually visit — restaurants, hotels, clubs and venues — are mapped. Different spellings of the same business are merged.

How locations are verified

Each venue name is matched, within its city, against the open Overture Maps places dataset (CDLA-Permissive 2.0, release 2026-08-19.0). The result is shown as one of three tiers:

• Verified location — a restaurant or hotel with exactly this name was found, or the location was checked against the venue's official website and public listings.
• Approximate location — the name matched closely but not exactly. It could be a different business with a similar name, so the badge is shown on the page.
• City only — no match was found. The record counts toward the city's totals but gets no pin and no page.

City coordinates come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); map tiles are served by OpenFreeMap from OpenStreetMap contributor data.

Amendments and withdrawals

The government occasionally corrects or removes records after publication. Each monthly refresh is compared with the previous one: changed records are flagged "amended", records that vanish are flagged "withdrawn", and both are listed in the data changelog. Withdrawn records are excluded from totals and rankings.

Limitations

• Amounts are in Canadian dollars exactly as disclosed. When a record names several vendors, its amount is split equally between them.
• Typos in vendor names, closures and same-name businesses can put a pin in the wrong place. Wrong pins are corrected when reported.
• This site makes no judgement about any official; it only lists disclosed facts.

Data last refreshed September 27, 2026. Rows in the source file: 68,047.