According to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, a Canadian research think tank, the City of Hamilton’s 2024 budget transparency and accountability were the worst in Canada.
The City of Hamilton received a failing F letter grade for its 2024 budget process and, even worse, scored a zero.
The grade and further analysis were part of the C.D. Howe Institute’s annual report card, which judged the financial transparency of Canada’s largest cities.
The document, entitled “Could Do Better: Grading the Fiscal Accountability of Canada’s Municipalities, 2024,” ranks 32 different Canadian cities and is part of a decade-long project by the think tank to improve municipal fiscal accountability.
The report is co-written by the Institute’s President and CEO, William Robson and Research Officer Nicholas Dahir.
Robson says, “Local governments provide so much – roads, water, emergency services – and those things cost.”
“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.”
He says that the City of Hamilton received an F because the budget was passed after the fiscal year had already started, it did not present city-wide gross or net expenses, and it did not follow public sector accounting standards (PSAS).
Hamilton’s 2024 budget was passed on February 15, 2024.
The report says that “councillors should consider their municipality’s budget well before, and vote on it before the fiscal year begins.”
The Institute says that failure to do so equates to “spending without authorization by elected representatives,” which “violates a core principle of democracy.”
Additionally, the City of Hamilton’s financial statements for 2023 were not available at the time of publication, which the report notes is “very late.”
Dahir says, “Confusing and late financial documents make it harder to follow the money and to hold anyone accountable.”
“If the numbers don’t line up, how is a councillor, journalist, or taxpayer supposed to know what changed?”
“Clear budgeting isn’t just a technical issue,” Robson adds. “It’s a basic requirement of good governance.”
Richmond, British Columbia, was the only municipality to earn an A for producing a budget consistent with PSAS standards.
Ottawa, Quebec City, and Vancouver followed with A-minus scores due to timely reporting, consolidating key numbers, and clear reconciliations between their projections and their year-end results.
The other municipalities to receive an F were Gatineau, Regina, and Windsor.
The report calls for all municipalities to “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.”
Hamilton’s previous grades were a B-minus in 2021, a D-plus in 2022, and an F in 2023.
Thus, this is the second straight year that the city has received an F grade.
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
