Federal Fiscal Balances Explorer

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. Over time tracks balances across years, Across provinces compares them in one year or over a period, and What drives the balance breaks them into taxes, transfers and purchases since . Every chart and table can be downloaded, as can the full dataset. Definitions and sources are in the Notes.

Balance

Show

Governments

Measure

Years

Over time (and the period)

From

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 and local 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.

Measures

Millions of dollars: nominal values.
dollars: deflated by Canada’s consumer price index, with as the base year.
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.

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.

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 and available on GitHub. 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.