Federal Spending Methodology

These pages are generated from the Public Accounts of Canada. This page documents the accounting bases, curation choices, and known differences so the numbers are traceable to source.

Volume I vs Volume II basis

Headline totals on the overview page (total spending, revenue, and deficit) use the Volume I consolidated financial statements, which are prepared on an accrual basis and include consolidated Crown corporations. Department pages use the Volume II appropriations (expenditure) basis, reported ministry by ministry. Because the two bases differ, the sum of Volume II ministry totals will not equal the Volume I consolidated total. The reconciliation below bridges the two.

Curation differences from the previous site

The previous hand-authored pages contained curated aggregations — for example, hand-massaged negative leaves and thematic groupings that split a single ministry across categories. Every node where the generated tree differs from the previous values is enumerated in the parity report with a reason code (basis, mapping, rounding, or source correction).

Machinery-of-government changes

Ministries have been renamed and merged between 2013 and 2025 (for example, Indian Affairs became Crown-Indigenous Relations). A normalization crosswalk is the canonical mapping; department pages for earlier years render under the current ministry slug with a note stating how the ministry was reported in that fiscal year.

Negative and adjustment rows

Parenthesized negatives, internal consolidation adjustments, and total or subtotal rows are flagged and excluded from Sankey leaves to avoid double counting, but they are retained in the line-item tables so the full detail remains available.

Units

Source tables arrive in mixed units (Volume I in millions, Volume II in dollars, open data CSVs in thousands). All chart data is normalized to billions of dollars; line-item tables are shown in dollars. Each JSON file records its units explicitly.

Thematic mapping

The Sankey uses a curated thematic tree. A maintained mapping assigns each Public Accounts line to a thematic node, mostly at the ministry or organization level with line-level overrides where needed. Each node is truncated to its largest children with the remainder rolled into an “Other” aggregate.

Translation

French labels use official bilingual terminology from open government data as a glossary; only free-text line-item descriptions are machine-translated, with the glossary supplied as required terminology. Translations are committed and reviewed, not generated at build time.

Inflation adjustment

Each year carries a Consumer Price Index multiplier to base-year dollars. The real/nominal toggle scales displayed headline and department figures in the browser; the underlying data is stored in nominal dollars only.

Volume I to Volume II reconciliation, FY 2024-25

Source and licence

Data is derived from the Public Accounts of Canada under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Public Accounts of Canada