The contributions data found in this repository was sourced from the Elections Canada website in mid-2014. Elections Canada makes these records publicly available in two forms: as they were submitted, and with unspecified corrections made over the course of an internal review process. Though both sets were scraped, the 'as submitted' data was elected for analysis because it was complete for all the years and parties of interest, whereas the 'reviewd' data was not. Hence the 'as submitted' data is the only set available in this repository. CSVs of the 'reviewed' data set can be found in this other GitHub repository.
The full data set contains roughly 1.5 million records. It has been split over a number of files - organized by party and year - for the sake of portability (files over 100MB cannot be pushed to GitHub). An R script is available in the munged_data folder that quickly concatenates all the data into a single CSV file.
contributor_id (generated) A unique ID given to each contributor (for grouping all their contributions together).
full_name (unchanged) The name of the contributor. Name's prefixed by 'Estate of' denote a contribution to a party left in the contributor's will. There is no limit on a contribution in this case.
postal_code (adjusted) The Postal Code of the contributor. Only valid postal codes have been preserved. Invalid codes and blanks have been converted to the value NA.
contribution_amount (unchanged) The amount of the contribution, in cents. Note that there is no limit on how big a contribution a Canadian can leave in their will. Such a contribution will be denotated by the prefix 'Estate of' in the full_name column.
party_name (generated) The official name of the party to which the contribution was made.
federal_contribution (generated) TRUE/FALSE values indicating whether the contribution was made directly to the federal party (TRUE) or one of its electoral-district/riding associations (FALSE).
party_riding (unchanged) The name of the party, or electoral-district/riding association to which the contribution was made.
target_riding (generated) The official name of the electoral-district/riding to which the contribution was made.
contributors_riding_name (generated) The official name of the electoral-district/riding where the contributor resides.
contributors_riding_id (generated) The official id of the electoral-district/riding where the contributor resides.
city (unchanged) The contributor's city.
province (unchanged) The contributor's province.
contribution_date.adjusted (adjusted) The date of the contribution.
flag.negative_contrib (generated) TRUE indicates that a contribution amount is a negative number. The meaning of negative contributions is yet unclear. They might be records to show that previous, positive contributions from the same contributor have been revoked.
flag.blank_contrib (generated) TRUE indicates that the contribution amount of the original record was either blank or zero.