The Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) is Canada’s leading nonprofit investigative newsroom. Our mandate: strengthen Canadian democracy by increasing transparency and accountability in the public sector at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. We pursue this in two main ways: by publishing public interest databases on topics like who donates to politicians and who lobbies the government; and second, by leveraging those databases in our own hard-hitting investigative reporting. The IJF’s innovative model – pairing investigative journalism with the production of public interest databases – is entirely novel in Canada. We are the only organization in Canada that centralizes and preserves public interest repositories on politicians and governments.
The IJF’s model is designed to empower journalists at any media outlet in Canada. Our databases allow reporters to easily find out who is giving money to politicians, whether those donors are getting meetings to lobby politicians, and what behind-the-scenes conversations happen before and after those meetings. They can find stories about who tries to influence the government and whether those efforts are successful. These types of stories used to take reporters weeks or even months to find, by manually digging through dozens of clunky, out-of-date repositories. In our centralized, easy-to-use databases, they now take minutes. In this way, the IJF is an impact multiplier, ensuring that more hard-hitting stories about the Canadian public sector are published every year.
Founded in 2020 and publicly launched in 2023, the IJF is made up of 15 journalists and editors, web and application developers, marketers, and fundraisers. Our work is supported by over $5 million in total funding from partners like the Balsillie Family Foundation, the Tiny Foundation, the Avanti Foundation, Northwestern University’s Data Driven Reporting Project, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Our tech team has been hard at work over the past year. We launched three incredible new databases: (1) Our West Coast Accountability database opens the doors to the Vancouver and Victoria city halls, storing records of municipal political donations and lobbying activities; (2) Our Procurement database shines a light on government contracting, storing all the details of federal and B.C. tenders and awards; and (3) Our Residential Schools database offers the first opportunity to compare inconsistent redactions in government documents and reveals more secrets of the Canadian residential school system.
We also have a world-class team of editors, reporters, web and application developers, marketers, and fundraisers. In 2024, we made some internal structural improvements to help our team continue to thrive. We’ve hired experienced, brilliant people who share our vision of strengthening democracy, and we’ve added a management layer and hired fantastic leaders like Technology Manager Max Hartshorn and Director of Marketing Shirley Moore. We undertook a consultative human resources policy-making process with our staff, that enshrined best practices on things like flexible work, work-life balance, and ensuring an equitable and safe workplace for everyone. In short, in 2024, we proved that our model of building a journalism outlet that does top-notch public interest work while rapidly growing is sustainable.
