Weaknesses
No data set is perfect, and no data set can provide what is required to answer every research question. This includes the data we are presenting here. It is important for users to know of these imperfections so that they can know when to be cautious with their interpretations and conclusions. For that reason, in what follows and for each province, we explain what our data is measuring, the shortcomings of our data, and note when they should be interpreted cautiously.
A strength of the data presented by Statistics Canada is the imposition of a common accounting regimen across provinces and over time. But, as noted above, this comes at the cost of Statistics Canada presenting relatively short time series starting with 2007. The imposition of a common accounting regime is a goal of the FON dataset that is largely, though not completely achieved by splicing together data constructed and published previously by Statistics Canada.1 Because of differences in the accounting conventions applied in each of these Statistics Canada publications, there remain differences that challenge comparisons over time and across provinces.
FON reports differences due to changes in accounting conventions to be small making it possible for researchers to make fair comparisons of revenues across provinces and to compare a province’s revenues, and a limited number of expenditures, to what is reported in earlier years. Thus, at least with respect to provincial government revenues, the FON data set achieves the desired goal of a long time series of data that is largely comparable over time and across provinces. The lack of a common accounting regimen across provinces is a weakness of the data reported in the Department of Finances Fiscal Reference Tables and in our own data.
In recognition of this weakness, an important part of our effort at data collection is to maintain as much as possible a consistent definition of each provincial government’s spending and revenue over time. This will sometimes require we dig deep into public accounts to reallocate spending from one category to another when a government changes how they aggregate spending into the broad categories of Health, Education, and Social Services. While we strive for a consistent definition of these spending categories over time, what we report will not be perfect in that regard. We report the assumptions we have made in what follows.
Because provinces do not necessarily report their finances in their public accounts in the same way, we caution users about comparing the size of revenue and spending categories across provinces.