What Data is Presented

All provinces define their fiscal year as the period from April 1st to March 31st of the following year. For all provinces, we report data on six revenue categories, namely, Personal Income Tax, Corporation Income Tax, Retail Sales Tax, Other Own Source Revenue, Transfers Received from the Federal Government, and Total Revenue. When they are a significant source of revenue, we also report the amount of revenue received from the sale of natural resources (Natural Resource Revenue). For all provinces, we report data on six spending categories, namely, Health, Education, Social Services, Other Program Expenditures, Debt Service, and Total Expenditure. We report the annual deficit as the difference between Total Revenue and Total Expenditure. All data is reported in millions of nominal dollars.

Reporting the size of government debt is a perilous exercise. Any government’s public accounts will report alternative definitions of public debt. All have uses but all are based on different assumptions. We do not report values of government debt. It is noteworthy, however, that our accounts provide a measure of the annual imbalance between revenue and expenditure for each province. Most often, these imbalances are deficits where total expenditure exceeds total revenue. In some years and for some provinces, we also see surpluses where total revenue exceeds total expenditure. Summing all past deficits and surpluses over a specified period produces a calculation of the government’s “accumulated deficit” over that period. This is legitimately described as the addition to government debt over that period caused by the fiscal imbalances in the budget we have defined. Thus, while we do not provide measures of government debt, our data does allow one to observe how the level of government debt has changed over time.