Federal Fiscal Balances Explorer

About this explorer and how to use it

The federal government collects revenue and spends money in every province, but rarely in equal measure. This tool shows how much federal revenue was raised in each province, how much federal spending occurred there, and the difference between the two, the federal fiscal balance, from to . A positive balance means Ottawa collected more in the province than it spent there.

Raw balances are the data as measured. Adjusted balances remove the effect of the overall federal surplus or deficit by comparing each province with the national average per person, so they add up to zero across Canada. To use it, pick a view: Over time tracks balances for selected governments or stacks every region into a national total; Across provinces compares provinces in one year, adds up their balances since a year you choose, or sets federal revenue against federal spending; Map shades each province by its balance in any year, per person and in total; What drives the balance breaks balances into taxes, transfers and purchases since ; and Balances and income relates balances, or any of their parts, to GDP per person. Each view has a chart and a table, and everything can be downloaded. Definitions and sources are in the Notes.

Balance

Show

Governments

Measure

Years

Range of years

From

Comparisons across provinces

Year

Compare with

Include territoriesAdd the three territories, combined, to the comparisons across provinces. Their per-person balances are many times the provinces'. Mark source changesDashed lines where Statistics Canada's source tables change, in . Values on either side may not be fully comparable.

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What the data are

For each province, and for the three territories together, the data estimate how much revenue the federal government collected there and how much it spent there, from to . The fiscal balance is the difference: federal revenue collected in the province less federal spending in the province. It includes the Canada Pension Plan’s contributions and benefits, but not the Quebec Pension Plan’s. A positive balance means the province’s residents and businesses paid more to Ottawa than it spent on them and in their province; a negative balance means the reverse. Years are calendar years.

Spending includes everything the federal government does in a province: transfers to its residents (such as Old Age Security, Employment Insurance and child benefits), transfers to its provincial, local and Indigenous governments (such as Equalization and the Canada Health and Social Transfers), and the wages, goods and services the federal government buys there, including for defence. Statistics Canada allocates federal revenue and spending to provinces in its provincial and territorial economic accounts. The methods are described in Tombe (2018), cited below.

Raw and adjusted balances

When the federal government runs a deficit overall, most provinces will tend to show negative balances; in a surplus year, most will tend to show positive ones. The raw balance mixes two things: how a province compares with the rest of the country, and the overall state of the federal budget. The adjusted balance removes the second. It measures each province’s federal revenue and spending per person relative to the national averages:

Adjusted balance = (revenue per person − national revenue per person) − (spending per person − national spending per person), times the province’s population
which is the same as: raw balance − the province’s population share × the overall federal balance.

Adjusted balances add up to zero across Canada in every year, so they show how much federal finances redistribute towards or away from each province. A positive adjusted balance means the province contributes more, per person, than the average; a negative one means it receives more. In the adjusted view, revenue and spending are also shown relative to an equal per-person share of the national totals, so the adjusted balance is the revenue difference less the spending difference. For all provinces and territories combined, every adjusted value is zero by construction.

What drives the balance

From on, the balance can be split into the components below. Revenue items raise the balance; spending items, shown as negative values, lower it. The components add up to the balance. In the adjusted view, each component is measured relative to its national per-person average in the same way, and the adjusted components add up to the adjusted balance.

Change between years starts from a province’s balance in one year and steps through the change in each component to its balance in a later year, so the bars add up to the change in the balance. Because spending items are negative, a blue bar can mean higher federal revenue from the province or lower federal spending there, and a red bar the reverse.

Measures

Millions of dollars: nominal values.
dollars: deflated by Canada’s consumer price index, with as the base year. The base year is always the latest year in the data, so it moves forward when a new year is added.
Per person: divided by the province’s population.
Per cent of GDP: divided by the province’s nominal gross domestic product. The total for all provinces and territories uses the sum of their GDP.
Per cent of Canada’s GDP (stacked view): divided by the GDP of all provinces and territories combined.
Billions of dollars (stacked and cumulative views): as above, in billions.

In the comparison across provinces you can choose a period instead of a single year. For values in dollars, the period figure is the total over all years in the period, so values in dollars give the cumulative balance in today’s terms; adding up nominal dollars across many years is less meaningful. For per-person values and shares of GDP, it is the average of the yearly values.

All provinces, stacked

This view stacks every region’s balance in each year, so the bars show the national picture. Six provinces are shown on their own; New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are combined as the Maritimes, and Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut as the Territories. Positive balances stack above zero and negative ones below. Adjusted balances add up to zero, so the bars above zero (regions contributing more than the national average) mirror those below (regions receiving more), and the height of either side is the total amount redistributed that year. Raw balances add up to the overall federal balance, shown by the dots. Values are in billions of dollars or as a share of Canada’s GDP: each region’s balance divided by the GDP of all provinces and territories combined, so the shares add up to the national total.

Cumulative balances

The cumulative view adds up each province’s yearly balances over the years you choose. In dollars, each year is first converted to prices, so the total is the amount contributed or received in today’s terms. Per person, the total adds up the yearly per-person balances (in dollars): roughly what a resident present in every one of those years contributed or received. As a share of GDP, it is the total balance over the period divided by the province’s total GDP over the same years.

Revenue and spending

This view shows the federal revenue collected in each province beside the federal spending there, both as measured (raw), per person or as a share of the province’s GDP. The hatched cap marks the gap. Where revenue exceeds spending, the gap is a net outflow: more money leaves the province for Ottawa than Ottawa spends there. Where spending exceeds revenue, it is a net inflow. The gap is the raw fiscal balance. The bars for Canada show the national averages; their gap is the overall federal surplus or deficit, which is why the adjusted balances measure each province against those averages instead.

Map

The map shades each province by its fiscal balance in the year chosen, per person (in dollars or dollars of the day) or as a share of its GDP. Blue provinces are above zero and red ones below; with adjusted balances, these are the net contributors and net recipients. The large figure is the value shown by the shading and the smaller one the province’s total, in billions of dollars. The two scales above the map place every province on each measure. The shading is in round steps, open at both ends. By default the steps and the two scales are fitted to the year shown, so the colours spread across that year’s range. Choose Same for all years to fix them at steps that cover most values since instead, so colours can be compared from one year to the next, which suits Play; provinces beyond the outer steps take the darkest shade. The territories are left out of the map because their per-person balances are many times the provinces’; their combined values are given below the map and in the table. Boundaries are from Natural Earth (public domain), simplified and drawn in Statistics Canada’s Lambert conformal conic projection.

Balances and income

This view plots a balance, or one of its parts, against GDP per person. With vs. Canada, GDP per person is shown as a percentage of the national figure (all provinces and territories), which lets years with different price levels be compared; Dollars uses dollars. Provinces shows one dot per province for the year chosen under Years (or the average over a period); Every year shows one dot per province and year from the From to the To year. The line is an ordinary least-squares fit, with each dot counting equally, and the correlation is the Pearson correlation of the dots shown. These are associations, not causal estimates: higher-income provinces pay more federal tax per person and tend to receive less from income-tested transfers and Equalization, but other things differ across provinces too. Components are available from .

Sources and breaks in the data

The figures combine three sets of Statistics Canada tables on federal and Canada Pension Plan revenue and expenditure by province: tables 36-10-0332 and 36-10-0336 (1961 to 1980), 36-10-0314 and 36-10-0315 (1981 to 2006) and 36-10-0450 (2007 on). Definitions differ somewhat between them, so turn on Mark source changes to see where one set ends and the next begins. The components come from table 36-10-0450 and are available from . Population is from tables 17-10-0005 and 36-10-0229, GDP from tables 36-10-0222 and 36-10-0325, and the consumer price index from table 18-10-0005.

The territories are combined because Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are not reported separately in the earlier data. The components are available for each territory, so the What drives the balance view also lets you choose them one at a time.

The data are maintained by Trevor Tombe. The full dataset, and the components, can be downloaded here: use the download buttons under the settings (on narrow screens, the Download tab of the settings), and every chart and table can be downloaded beneath it. The method is described in Trevor Tombe (2018), “Final and Unalterable – But Up for Negotiation: Federal-Provincial Transfers in Canada,” Canadian Tax Journal 66(4): 871–917.

How to cite

Questions or comments? Please email Trevor Tombe (University of Calgary) at .

Licence

This tool and its dataset are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt them for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit (see How to cite), link to the licence and say if you made changes. The underlying Statistics Canada data remain under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.