Data Updates on Finances of the Nation

We’re pleased to announce that we have uploaded new series on federal fiscal balances, aggregate federal transfers, and the national balance sheet for Canada, ready for use and analysis on the Finances of the Nation website.

These releases come at an opportune moment: with the latest provincial economic accounts from Statistics Canada now available, we have richer context to interpret the fiscal and economic developments over the past year.

The latest federal transfers data reports all transfers both major and minor by province using a variety of normalizations. You can select your own provinces, normalizations, and time periods in our interactive data dashboards.

The federal fiscal balances data reports the spatial distribution of federal revenues and expenditures across provinces, both raw and adjusted for aggregate imbalances. It further decomposes recent years by underlying components so you can see what’s driving surpluses and deficits in each region.

And finally the national balance sheet data sourced from Statistics Canada provides a look at the assets, liabilities, and so on, of households, corporations, governments, and more. It is updated quarterly. It also provides information on who holds Canadian federal debt, which saw a large increase during the COVID-19 pandemic as the Bank of Canada engaged in quantitative easing and subsequently declined as these holdings matured.