Canadians deserve access to more transparent city budgets
William Robson is president and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute. Nicholas Dahir is a research assistant at the institute.
If you have not yet peered into the murk of municipal budgets yourself, we encourage you to visit your own city’s website and search for its most recent budget. We are now well into March, so your municipality’s 2023 budget should be online. If it is not – the lateness of many city budgets is a topic for another day – the 2022 one will do. Chances are you will encounter a baffling array of numbers labelled “gross,” “net,” “tax-supported,” and “rate-supported” for the coming year’s expenditures.
Public-sector accounting standards give a clearer picture of a city’s capacity to deliver services – for example, by accounting for assets such as roads, sewers and buses over the course of their useful lives. When the often-confusing presentation of a city’s budget projections does not match the usually clear presentation of its financial results, citizens can’t answer – and may not even know to ask – what should be simple questions. For example, how much more, or less, does my city plan to spend and tax this year than it did last year? How much more, or less, did it spend and tax last year than it budgeted? In too many of Canada’s major cities, you can’t easily find the answers to these questions.
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