Federal and Provincial Debt Explorer

What the data are

The data measure what Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial governments owe at the end of each fiscal year (March 31). For the federal government there are three series, every year from to :

• Gross debt: all of the government’s liabilities. These include market debt (bonds and treasury bills), public service pension and other employee benefit obligations, and accounts payable.
• Financial assets: cash, investments, loans and accounts receivable, which could in principle be used to pay down debt.
• Net debt: gross debt less financial assets. This is the most common summary measure of a government’s debt burden.

For each province and territory the data show net debt from , as reported in each government’s public accounts. A negative value means the government’s financial assets exceed its liabilities. Alberta, for example, held net financial assets from 2000/01 to 2015/16.

Years

All values are for fiscal years. The federal and provincial fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31, so 2024/25 ends on March 31, 2025. Before 1907, the federal fiscal year ended on June 30. In the dataset (and in the year columns of the downloads), each fiscal year is labelled by the calendar year in which it ends, so 2024/25 is 2025.

Debt is measured at the end of the fiscal year. Following Finance Canada’s practice in the Fiscal Reference Tables, it is compared with GDP, population and prices for the calendar year in which the fiscal year begins. For example, net debt at the end of 2024/25 is divided by GDP for 2024. This reproduces Finance Canada’s published federal debt-to-GDP ratios. As a result, there are no shares of GDP or per-person values for .

Units

• Per cent of GDP: debt divided by nominal gross domestic product. Federal debt is compared with Canada’s GDP, and each province’s debt with that province’s own GDP.
• Billions of dollars: nominal values, as reported.
• Billions of dollars: deflated by Canada’s consumer price index, with as the base year.
• Dollars per person: divided by population (Canada’s for the federal government, the province’s own for a province).
• dollars per person: per-person values deflated by the consumer price index.

Totals

• All provinces adds up the net debt of the ten provinces and divides it by their combined population or GDP. The territories are left out because Nunavut’s data begin only in 1999/00.
• Federal and provincial combined adds federal net debt to the ten provinces’ net debt and divides the total by Canada’s population or GDP. Loans between the two orders of government cancel out in the sum, because they are a financial asset for one and a liability for the other. The total leaves out local governments, the territories, and the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans.

Each province’s share of federal debt

In the comparison across provinces you can add each province’s share of federal net debt. Federal debt is divided among provinces and territories in proportion to their populations:

Per person, the federal share is the same everywhere: federal net debt per Canadian. As a share of provincial GDP, it is larger in provinces with lower GDP per person. Dividing by population is only one possible allocation. Allocating by income or by taxes paid would give higher-income provinces a larger share.

Sources and breaks in the data

• Federal, to : Statistics Canada table 10-10-0048 (formerly CANSIM 385-0010), “Federal government debt, for fiscal year ending March 31,” drawn from the Historical Statistics of Canada. Gross debt is “Gross federal government debt,” financial assets are “Less: financial assets” and net debt is “Net federal government financial debt.”
• Federal, on: Finance Canada, , Table 15. Gross debt is total liabilities. Before 1983/84, Table 15 leaves net debt blank, so it is calculated as total liabilities less financial assets.
• Provinces and territories: Finance Canada, , Tables 18 to 30, from each government’s public accounts. For Alberta the series is “net financial debt (assets).” The territories’ latest year may be an interim estimate, marked with an asterisk (*) in the tables.
• GDP, population and prices: the Finances of the Nation macroeconomic database, built from Statistics Canada and historical sources.

The federal series has two breaks, which you can mark on the charts with Mark breaks in the federal series:

Provincial data are also affected by changes in accounting standards and in what each government consolidates into its accounts. Hospitals, school boards, universities and colleges, for example, were brought into the accounts in different years in different provinces. Comparisons across provinces, or across long spans of years, should be made with that in mind. The footnotes of each table in the Fiscal Reference Tables list the main breaks.

Shaded events

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 source data remain under their own licences: the Statistics Canada Open Licence, and the Open Government Licence – Canada for Finance Canada’s Fiscal Reference Tables.