According to findings by True North, the Canadian government spent a total of $4.63 billion in taxpayer dollars from the time the House of Commons adjourned on June 21, 2019 until July 12, 2019.
The information used for this analysis was mostly acquired from official Government of Canada news releases for the time period specified.
Our research team has now further broken down this data based on how much each province received from the Liberal government.
Excluding international and Canada-wide commitments a total of $2.27 billion was distributed to the provinces. Based on dollar value, 71.5% of the funding went to Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec), with Quebec receiving the most funding out of all of the provinces (62%). In Canadian dollars, Quebec received approximately $1.4 billion in federal contributions.
It is to be noted that a single $1.3 billion announcement for the Montreal metro heavily influenced Quebec’s large share of the total funding.
On the other hand, Western Canadian provinces received a total of 14.2% of the federal funds, with British Columbia receiving the second largest portion out of all of the provinces (13.7%) in the sum of $311 million taxpayer dollars. Alberta received the least amount of funding (0.1%) which only equates to $3.34 million.
The rest of the funding was awarded to Northern Canada and multi-provincial projects.
Multi-provincial funding was put into its own category because the lack of consistency from the Canadian government in reporting how the funds were allocated among the provinces included in the announcement. Out of the total funding allocated for the provinces, these announcements made up a significant 9.3%
Saskatchewan was also included in this category since no individual funding announcements for the province could be found.
When breaking down the funding announcements based on their quantity and not dollar value the picture becomes more even.
Out of a total of 136 individual provincial funding announcements made, Ontario takes first place with 32 total announcements (24%). Quebec follows not far behind with 29 different announcements (21%).
While British Columbia still leads in Western Canada with 15 announcements (11%), Alberta fares better with 6 announcements (4%) and Northwest Territories take last place with only two funding initiatives announced (1%).
The results of this breakdown are a close approximation based on the research findings of True North. It is likely that the total amount in funding for this period is larger than we have reported here.
