Provincial Government Assets, Liabilities, Sources and Application of Funds

Detailed information for March 31, 2004

The purpose of the survey is to produce the balance sheet for all provincial governments and one of the benchmarks required by the System of National Accounts.

Data release - September 12, 2005

• Description
• Data sources and methodology
• Data accuracy

Description

The purpose of the survey is to produce the balance sheet for all provincial governments and one of the benchmarks required by the System of National Accounts.

Reference period: The data pertain to financial assets and liabilities as at March 31st of each year

Collection period: October to July, as the financial statements (public accounts) are published.

Subjects

• Government

Data sources and methodology

Sampling

This methodology does not apply.

Estimation

There is very little use of estimation. For non-available breakdown, previous data are used as basis for estimation.

Quality evaluation

Design - Identifies: (1) the major categories of financial assets and their components; (2) the major categories of liabilities and their components; (3) the net debt or excess of liabilities over financial assets; (4) the guaranteed debt of provincial governments.

Procedures - Data are assembled to produce: (1) a full balance sheet for each province and territory; (2) a historical summary of financial assets, liabilities and guaranteed debt for the last ten years.

Disclosure control

Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any information it collects that could identify any person, business, or organization, unless consent has been given by the respondent or as permitted by the Statistics Act. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.

In order to prevent any data disclosure, confidentiality analysis is done using the Statistics Canada Generalized Disclosure Control System (G-Confid). G-Confid is used for primary suppression (direct disclosure) as well as for secondary suppression (residual disclosure). Direct disclosure occurs when the value in a tabulation cell is composed of or dominated by few enterprises while residual disclosure occurs when confidential information can be derived indirectly by piecing together information from different sources or data series.

Data accuracy

The high level of details provided in the public accounts, annual financial statements and other available source documents ensures excellent quality.