You pay.
They spend.
We keep
the receipts.

In 2015 Ottawa owed $1.1T. It had taken every government since Confederation to get there.

By 2025 it was $2.2T. The pandemic year added the biggest single step, and the climb did not stop when the pandemic did.

The plan is more: $1.4T by March 31, 2027 on Ottawa’s measure, and $2.5T owed in all. Interest alone is now $58.7 billion a year.

In November 2022, Ottawa forecast $3.4B for this year, the smallest figure it gave. By April 2026 its figure was $65.3B. The budget officer projects $71.8B.

By Ottawa’s rules, loans and investments are assets meant to come back, and buildings and equipment count as they wear out. So $67.8B of loans and investments, most of it to Crown corporations, and $17.7B of capital spending beyond the depreciation already counted stay out of its figure. Net of pension accounts and other transactions, they add $68.1B to Ottawa’s $65.3B: it must borrow $133.4B.

But the cash leaves now. Trans Mountain shows the risk. Kinder Morgan put the expansion at $5.4B in 2013. By 2024 the estimate was $34.2B, and at the budget officer’s 2024 valuations, Ottawa would book a loss if it sold.

Three bars a year. The promise: the smallest deficit promised or forecast for the year before it began, with the padding taken out where the document states it. For 2016-17 to 2019-20 that is the Liberals’ 2015 election platform, shown as printed, which promised a deficit of $9.9B for 2016-17 and a balanced budget by 2019-20, a surplus of $1.0B. After it come the budgets and fall statements since Budget 2016. Then the deficit Ottawa reported, and the deficit counted in full: what it had to borrow.

Ottawa’s best case: in the first three years of its budgets, its figure came in under the budgets’ forecasts. It never came near the platform’s. For 2016-17, most of the gap to Budget 2016 was padding. To allow for risks such as the oil slump, Budget 2016 cut the economists’ forecast for GDP by $40B a year, which added about $6B a year to the deficits it forecast. It printed $29.4B for 2016-17, or $23.4B without the padding. Ottawa’s figure came in at $19.0B. Counted in full, it borrowed $28.0B, more than the unpadded forecast, and more than the platform’s $9.9B.

In 2017-18 and 2018-19, even counted in full, it borrowed less than the unpadded budget forecasts. Ottawa’s own figure was still worse than the platform’s $9.5B and $5.7B. It didn’t last. Budget 2016 had said: The Government remains committed to returning to balanced budgets, and will do so in a responsible, realistic and transparent way. No year has balanced since, and every year from 2019-20 to 2025-26 has come in over the promise.

For 2023-24, Budget 2019 forecast $6.8B, with its adjustment for risk taken out. Ottawa reported $61.9B. Counted in full, it borrowed $85.7B.

2024-25 · the last audited year, three ways

In 2024-25, the last audited year, Ottawa reported a deficit of $36.3B. It had to borrow $130.0B.

The economy grows because there are more people in it. Per person, output in 2026-Q2 was $60,944, against $57,813 eleven years earlier.

Statistics Canada first reported 6 quarterly declines in a row in 2024. The Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor called productivity an emergency: I’m saying that it’s an emergency—it’s time to break the glass.

Canada ranks 35 of 37 OECD countries for growth in GDP per person since 2015.

Ottawa’s best case: Statistics Canada counts revenue where it is collected and spending where it is spent, so a federal service run from outside Alberta counts elsewhere. Even so, in 17 of the 18 years on record, Ottawa raised more in Alberta than it spent here. The money above the line left the province for good.

Per Albertan, in 2024, that was $3,876: federal revenue raised here minus federal spending here, in one year.