Finances of the Nation: The Economic Response of Governments in Canada to COVID-19 in the First Three Months of the Crisis

Abstract

For almost 60 years, the Canadian Tax Foundation published an annual monograph, Finances of the Nation, and its predecessor, The National Finances. In a change of format, the 2014 Canadian Tax Journal introduced a new "Finances of the Nation" feature, which presents annual surveys of provincial and territorial budgets and topical articles on taxation and public expenditures in Canada. In this article, the authors recount how Canadian governments have responded to the COVID-19 crisis through the economic measures announced between March 11 and May 15, 2020. Their analysis shows that Canadian governments have acted quite rapidly and that, by expanding emergency measures, they have tried to help just about everyone. The authors set out the estimated costs of the various measures, followed by a brief comparison of Canada's response with the responses of other countries. The underlying data for the Finances of the Nation monographs and for the articles in this journal will be published online in the near future.