Fuzzy Finances: Grading the Financial Reports of Canada’s Municipalities

Canada’s major cities tend to understate revenue and spending, wait too long to release budgets, and confuse taxpayers with obscure figures in their financial reports, finds a new study from the C.D. Howe Institute. In the 2017 edition of the Institute’s annual municipal fiscal accountability report card, titled Fuzzy Finances: Grading the Financial Reports of Canada’s Municipalities, authors William Robson, Benjamin Dachis, and Farah Omran evaluate the country’s 28 largest municipalities on their financial presentations and assign letter grades to each of them.