Federal Fiscal Capacity

Is the federal government on track to balance day-to-day operating spending with revenues by fiscal year 2028-29?

What is missing: No official machine-readable series isolates 'day-to-day operating spending' from capital investment on the same accounting basis the government uses for this anchor. Statistics Canada's National Accounts federal expenditure series (table 36-10-0477) separates final consumption expenditure from non-financial capital acquisition, but does not reproduce the Budget's own operating/capital split — the two decompositions are not confirmed to be identical.

Consequence: This commitment is published as a registered commitment without a compliance claim. Countability will not construct a proxy operating-balance measure by subtracting StatsCan capital-acquisition from federal expenditure absent confirmation that this matches the Budget's own definition.

How does Canada's actual federal debt-to-GDP ratio compare with Finance Canada's and PBO's projected paths?

What is missing: The only StatsCan machine-readable federal balance-sheet series (table 10-10-0016, Canadian Government Finance Statistics basis) lags materially behind the projection vintages: its cube metadata reports a latest reference year of 2024, roughly two fiscal years behind the 2025-26 starting point of both institutions' projection paths. It is also conceptually distinct from the Public Accounts 'federal debt' (accumulated deficit) concept both Finance Canada and PBO use in their own tables — CGFS liabilities and Public Accounts federal debt are not confirmed to be composed identically.

Consequence: Countability cannot publish a same-basis, current-vintage compliance comparison of actual federal debt-to-GDP against either institution's projected path. The two projected paths are published side by side as modelled benchmarks (never merged); Countability's own StatsCan-sourced debt figure is shown separately as clearly-dated context, not blended with either projection.

What share of Canada's exports to the United States is actually subject to tariffs right now, and at what effective rates?

What is missing: No official source on either side of the border publishes a continuously updated, machine-readable statement of the tariff status of Canadian exports. The operative documents state rates, scopes, and effective dates, but the duty actually applied to a shipment depends on USMCA qualification, product classification, exclusions, stacking rules, and later modifications — determinations spread across executive orders, proclamations, agency notices, and rulings, with no consolidated official series.

Consequence: The U.S. Exposure Brief shows the export record beside the dated tariff actions, but it cannot state what fraction of U.S.-bound exports is tariffed or at what effective rate — any such coverage percentage would be an outside model, not a reading of the record. Public claims about 'x per cent of exports now face tariffs' rest on estimates whose assumptions are rarely published.

How is the federal government's in-year fiscal position tracking right now, more currently than StatsCan's quarterly National Accounts release?

What is missing: Finance Canada publishes the Fiscal Monitor monthly with near-real-time actual revenue/expense/balance figures on the Public Accounts basis, but as HTML/PDF reports rather than a documented stable machine-readable API or bulk CSV feed comparable to StatsCan's Web Data Service. Countability's ingestion method (StatsCan WDS only, per its local-first/API-first reliability policy) does not reach this source for this reading.

Consequence: Countability's fiscal indicators run on StatsCan's own National Accounts vintage (quarterly, roughly one quarter of publication lag) rather than the Fiscal Monitor's faster monthly Public Accounts cadence; the two bases are related but not identical -- the same vintage/basis mismatch already recorded as its own published evidence gap.

Resolved 10 July 2026: The feed exists. Finance Canada publishes each month's Fiscal Monitor as a ZIP of CSVs on the Open Government Portal under the Open Government Licence – Canada, in an annual package per year (2026: f5f4327b-2a09-484a-a518-64ca26405386; 2025: 7680320b-c837-4b67-b73f-9361c4a9716d) with one YYYY-MM.zip resource per month. The March 2026 archive was downloaded and read for this resolution: HTTP 200, 18,205 bytes, sha256 fe00ff4a0af189e55f3890424be881e33e112f565ecb8e9f6ce3ab7a35558716, twenty files (Table_1.csv through Table 7.csv, French equivalents, and chart data), parsed end to end with Python's standard library alone. Table_1.csv reports an April-to-March 2025-26 budgetary balance of -55,277 million dollars. This is a downloadable dataset distinct from the HTML report, which is exactly what this gap's closing condition asked for. TWO THINGS THIS RESOLUTION DOES NOT SAY. It does not say Countability now ingests the Fiscal Monitor: it does not, and the consequence recorded above still describes the platform's fiscal indicators, which continue to run on Statistics Canada's National Accounts vintage. Whether to ingest it is a build decision, not a data gap. And it does not say the machine-readable channel is safe to ingest naively: the CSVs carry none of the caveats the HTML narrative carries. Searched across all twenty files in the archive, the phrases 'not final', 'audited', and 'Public Accounts' appear zero times, while the HTML report states that the March results 'are not the final results for 2025-26' -- final results move by billions, in both directions, in the post-March period -- and that the figures 'have not been audited or reviewed by an external auditor'. A fetcher for this source must carry those caveats as curated text; the bytes will not supply them.