Four Canadian Cities Flunk Budget Transparency – Four Make the Honour Roll

April 15, 2025 – Many of Canada’s biggest cities struggle with the basics of financial transparency, says a new report card from the C.D. Howe Institute. The annual Institute report grades the fiscal transparency and accountability of 32 major municipalities. This year, four earned top marks, while four flunked outright.

In “Could Do Better: Grading the Fiscal Accountability of Canada’s Municipalities, 2024,” William B.P. Robson and Nicholas Dahir assess how clear, timely, and useful city budgets and year-end financial statements are. The results show wide disparities.

“Local governments provide so much – roads, water, emergency services – and those things cost,” said Robson, the Institute’s President and CEO. “But too often, city budgets are late, and so convoluted that hardly anybody can figure out what the spending plan is, or whether spending stayed on track.”

Richmond, BC, was the only municipality to earn an A for producing a budget consistent with Public Sector Accounting Standards (PSAS) – a best practice that is surprisingly rare. Ottawa, Quebec City, and Vancouver followed with A-minus scores thanks to timely reporting, consolidated key numbers, and clear reconciliations between their projections and their year-end results.

At the other end of the scale, Gatineau, Hamilton, Regina, and Windsor earned Fs. Common problems included budgets passed after the fiscal year had already started, missing or hard-to-find numbers, and financial statements that were late or impossible to reconcile with the original budget.

“Confusing and late financial documents make it harder to follow the money and to hold anyone accountable,” said Dahir. “If the numbers don’t line up, how is a councillor, journalist, or taxpayer supposed to know what changed?”

The report calls for practical fixes: approve budgets before the fiscal year starts, present the budget numbers in the same PSAS-consistent format as year-end statements, and provide apples-to-apples comparisons to the original budget in the year-end statements.

“Clear budgeting isn’t just a technical issue,” said Robson. “It’s a basic requirement of good governance.”

Read the Full Report

For more information, contact: William B.P. Robson, President and Chief Executive Officer, C.D. Howe Institute; Nicholas Dahir, Research Officer, C.D. Howe Institute; Percy Sherwood, Associate Editor and Communications Officer, C.D. Howe Institute, 416-407-4798, psherwood@cdhowe.org.

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