Debt tracker

Only whole quarters are counted, and each is set against the same quarter a year earlier — quarterly flows are not seasonally adjusted, so a spring quarter is never compared with a winter one, and a part-year is never ranked against full years.

Statistics Canada, table 10-10-0015-01 (quarterly, calendar quarters). The quarterly table is revised more often than the annual one, so a year’s four quarters can differ by up to about one per cent from that year’s annual figure below.

The balance is net lending/borrowing: a negative number is a deficit that adds to the debt. 2020 is the pandemic year.

Statistics Canada groups spending by type, not by department. Much of “grants” and “social benefits” is money that passes through to provinces and households rather than programs Ottawa runs itself. Spending by department needs the Public Accounts (Volume II), which is not loaded here yet; the contracts panel below shows what each department bought from suppliers.

In 2025 departments signed 71,725 contracts worth $33.7B at signing (contracts over $10,000, from the Gov Watch series). This is a slice of federal spending — what was bought from suppliers — not the whole budget.

What this counts. The value each contract carried when it was signed, counted once, in the calendar year it was signed — so it measures commitments, not money paid out in that year. A multi-year contract counts in full in its first year, which is why a single large award can dominate a department (flagged above). Later amendments are left out because the source file contains entry errors in amended totals. The disclosure file re-reports contracts in later quarters; each is counted once here. Source: Treasury Board proactive disclosure, through Gov Watch.

Each measure is compared with the previous year and with 2019, the last year before the pandemic. Nothing here says whether a given level of debt is too high — that is a judgement, not a statistic.

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