Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Government Subsidies in Canada - A $684 Billion Price Tag
This study attempts to measure the scope of government subsidies in Canada using three data sets.
The first is from Statistics Canada from the 1981 to 2009 fiscal years. This data shows that between April 1, 1980 and March 31, 2009, federal, provincial, and local governments spent $683.9 billion on subsidies to private sector businesses, government business enterprises, and consumers. The federal government spent the most, with $342.6 billion spent between 1981 and 2009 on such subsidies. The province of Quebec was next, where subsidies have increased in almost every year with few exceptions and where subsidies went mainly to private and government business: $115.5 billion between 1981 and 2009.
The second set of data is from Industry Canada. Between 1961 and 2013, the federal department of industry disbursed $22.4 billion to businesses. As many of these corporations or their parent companies are large and well established, the justification for such subsidies appears to be weak.
The third dataset is derived from VIA Rail annual reports. The company has received $4.5 billion in operating and capital subsidies from the federal government between 1996 and 2012.
On the specific question of subsidies to business, governments should support international efforts to end subsidies, including strengthening bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements to more clearly prohibit such subsidies. It is in Canada?s interest to reduce rules against our imports and to be able to compete with non-subsidized companies from other jurisdictions.
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Mark Milke
Mark Milke was a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute between 2010 and 2015. Mr. Milke led the Institute’s workon Alberta-related issues as well as contributing to a broad host of national and regional studies. Mr. Milke is currently an independent analyst and consultant in Calgary.Mr. Milke has authored four books on Canadian politics and policy and dozens of studies on topics such as property rights, public sector pensions, corporate welfare, competition policy, aboriginal matters and taxes. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Mr. Milke was the research director for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and former B.C. and Alberta director with the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation. His work has been published widely in Canada since 1997 and in addition to the Fraser Institute, his papers have also been published in the United States by the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and in Europe by the Brussels-based Centre for European Studies.Mr. Milke’s opinion columns appear regularly in the Calgary Herald and Globe and Mail, as well as in the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, and Victoria Times Colonist. Mr. Milke has a Master’s degree from the University of Alberta where his M.A. thesis analyzed human rights in East Asia; he also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Calgary where his doctoral dissertation analyzed the rhetoric of Canadian-American relations. Mr. Milke is president of Civitas, and a past lecturer in Political Philosophy and International Relations at the University of Calgary.… Read more