Which public promises can actually be checked?
A commitment stated in a concept no official series measures is not a checkable promise, whatever its political weight. Whether a government's stated targets can be held against public data at all is a precondition for every other accountability question this platform asks.
The platform's sharpest original finding, recurred across independent domains: a stable share of registered Canadian commitments cannot be verified from any public series, and the record names exactly which commitment and which missing measurement blocks each one. This question is the platform's identity at its highest altitude.
Registered commitments
New temporary resident arrivals of 385,000 in 2026 (370,000 in 2027 and 2028)
Issuer: Government of Canada (IRCC, 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan). Stated in 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan.
Latest observed: — against target 385,000.
Create 250,000 new AI-related jobs over five years, as part of an additional $200 billion of economic growth
Issuer: Government of Canada (Prime Minister's Office, 'AI for All' national AI strategy). Stated in AI for All strategy launch.
Latest observed: — against target 250,000.
Balance day-to-day operating spending with revenues by fiscal year 2028-29 (fiscal anchor announced in Budget 2025, reaffirmed in the Spring Economic Update 2026)
Issuer: Government of Canada (Department of Finance). Stated in Spring Economic Update 2026, reaffirming Budget 2025.
Latest observed: — against target 0.
Achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050
Issuer: Government of Canada (Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act). Stated in Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, S.C. 2021, c. 22, assented to 2021-06-29.
Latest observed: — against target 0.
Where institutions disagree
What cannot yet be known
Is the 385,000 new-temporary-resident-arrivals target for 2026 being met?
What is missing: No held public series measures the plan's 'new arrivals' concept. IRCC monthly permit flows count documents becoming effective (including renewals and in-Canada transitions); StatsCan net-NPR change nets out departures.
Consequence: The arrivals target is published as a registered target without a compliance claim; permit flows are shown as labelled proxies only.
Is AI adoption creating, displacing, or reshaping jobs — and is the government's 250,000-AI-job target on track?
What is missing: No official series attributes job creation, displacement, or reshaping to AI adoption specifically. Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey and business-adoption surveys measure aggregate employment and technology use separately; there is no published methodology linking the two, and the government has not stated how the 'AI for All' strategy's 250,000-job target will be measured.
Consequence: This commitment is published as a registered commitment without a compliance claim. Countability will not publish INFERRED claims attributing employment changes to AI adoption absent an official attribution methodology.
Is the federal government on track to balance day-to-day operating spending with revenues by fiscal year 2028-29?
What is missing: No official machine-readable series isolates 'day-to-day operating spending' from capital investment on the same accounting basis the government uses for this anchor. Statistics Canada's National Accounts federal expenditure series (table 36-10-0477) separates final consumption expenditure from non-financial capital acquisition, but does not reproduce the Budget's own operating/capital split — the two decompositions are not confirmed to be identical.
Consequence: This commitment is published as a registered commitment without a compliance claim. Countability will not construct a proxy operating-balance measure by subtracting StatsCan capital-acquisition from federal expenditure absent confirmation that this matches the Budget's own definition.
What trajectory would take Canada from its 2035 target to net-zero in 2050?
What is missing: No official projection of Canadian emissions extends beyond 2035. Environment and Climate Change Canada's own projections, published annually, reach 2035 in the current (2026) vintage; the preceding vintage reached 2040. Net-zero by 2050 is enshrined in the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, and the fifteen years between the end of the projection and the target year carry no published official path.
Consequence: The net-zero commitment is registered here with no compliance verdict. Any pace convention Countability could state over a twenty-four-year horizon with no official trajectory to compare against would be an invention of Countability's own, which is precisely what this platform does not do. The commitment is real, dated, and legislated; what is absent is anything official to measure it against between now and then.
The projection record
A record, not a ranking: this entry states what was published and how it compares to what followed. It never says who was right, which institution performed better, or grades a forecaster's competence. See the full public Resolution record →
The federal budgetary balance for fiscal 2025-26, across four Finance Canada projection vintages, before the audited Public Accounts settle it
Canada's federal budgetary balance (surplus/deficit) for fiscal year 2025-26, as the Department of Finance Canada's own summary fiscal outlook stated it in four successive publications -- Budget 2024, the 2024 Fall Economic Statement, Budget 2025, and the Spring Economic Update 2026 -- each read from that publication's own headline fiscal table. No audited outcome exists yet: the Public Accounts of Canada for 2025-26 will settle this fiscal year in autumn 2026, and this entry pins the projection lineage on the record before that settlement, adjudicating none of it.
comparable · difference -3.3 · same issuer. Numeric difference: the later publication's projected value minus the earlier one's, for the same fiscal year (2025-26), in billions of Canadian dollars. A negative number means the later projection is a larger deficit t…
comparable · difference -36.1 · same issuer. Numeric difference: the later publication's projected value minus the earlier one's, for the same fiscal year (2025-26), in billions of Canadian dollars. Same-issuer vintage comparison; no audited outcome exists yet. pct…
comparable · difference 11.4 · same issuer. Numeric difference: the later publication's projected value minus the earlier one's, for the same fiscal year (2025-26), in billions of Canadian dollars. A positive number means the later projection is a smaller deficit …
comparable · difference -28.0 · same issuer. Numeric difference: the latest captured projected value minus the first projected value, for fiscal 2025-26, in billions of Canadian dollars (the cumulative movement across all three re-projections). This is the entry's …
comparable · difference 11.623 · same issuer. Numeric difference: the Fiscal Monitor's unaudited year-end observation minus Finance Canada's final pre-settlement projection, for fiscal 2025-26, in billions of Canadian dollars. A positive number means the observed ye…
- No audited outcome exists yet. This entry is a pinned projection lineage, not a projection-vs-outturn resolution: every value is one of Finance Canada's own successive projections for fiscal 2025-26, and none is an observed or audited result. The Public Accounts of Canada for 2025-26 (expected autumn 2026, issued by the Receiver General) will settle this fiscal year; when it does, a later reading records the audited outcome and the projection-vs-outturn resolution steps -- nothing here is edited in place. The entry is registered now so the four first-published projections are on the record, hash-pinned, before the outcome that would otherwise reframe them exists.
- Every value is restated exactly as Finance Canada first published it and none has been attested by an independent auditor. These two provenance axes are carried on every value so that, when the audited Public Accounts outcome is added, its own assurance and its own basis are stated on the same two axes and never silently conflated with these projections.
- This entry compares Finance Canada against itself: the same headline quantity, the same fiscal year, four successive projection vintages of the same summary fiscal outlook. It is a projection-drift record, not a disagreement between institutions -- the pace and direction at which one issuer's own projection for a single year moved as it re-forecast. No direction of movement is described as more or less sound; the signed difference in billions is the disclosed comparison.
What would change the record
- IRCC publication of new-arrival counts on the levels-plan definition.
- A published government measurement methodology for the AI-jobs target, or an official statistical series attributing employment change to AI adoption.
- A published government or StatsCan methodology mapping the Budget's operating/capital expenditure split onto a continuously updated machine-readable series.
- A published official emissions trajectory to 2050, or the interim milestone targets for 2040 and 2045 that the Act contemplates, with numeric values.
- A NATO or Canadian institution publishing a continuously updated, single-definition defence-expenditure/GDP series on a fixed cadence with a stable methodology note -- or Countability building and maintaining its own reconciled series from the underlying appropriation/expenditure and GDP primitives, which is out of scope for this reading.
- A system operator, a regulator, or Statistics Canada publishing a continuously updated, openly licensed series of requested connection capacity (national, or provincial and aggregable), by project class.
- Either government publishing a continuously updated, openly licensed series of duty collections or tariff coverage on Canada–U.S. trade at product grain — or customs releasing duty-assessed values beside trade values on a compatible classification.
- Statistics Canada publishing the multifactor-productivity decomposition (table 36-10-0208-01 or a successor) for reference years 2024 and 2025, closing the lag to within a year or two of the current quarter.
- A proponent stating its own demand in a public filing; an issuer publishing station load attributable to a single customer; or a regulatory instrument compelling plant-grain disclosure. None is currently on the record for these projects.
- A transmitter or distributor publishing per-user apportionments of shared station capacities, in a planning document or a rate filing. The next Needs Assessment cycle for any region with a shared constrained station is the natural place to watch.
- The issuer posting assessments for active large applications as a matter of course, or posting the specific assessments for the register's four largest active applications. Each such posting immediately converts a register row into a checkable engineering quantity.
- The current planning cycle naming and quantifying the need: the Northwest Region's Integrated Regional Resource Plan, which the 2025 Needs Assessment commits the working group to develop after the Scoping Assessment, is the natural place. A connection application from a named mine appearing in the connection register, a Hydro One leave-to-construct filing for the Greenstone line stating the load it is sized to serve, or an IESO study naming Ring of Fire load would each close it.
- A producer stating a project-level shipping commitment in a public filing, a regulator publishing shipper-level allocations, or a proceeding placing contract volumes on the public record.
- The board (or its administrative-tribunal service) publishing hearings-held and hearings-scheduled series on a stated cadence, at any grain from national totals down.
- The operator or the applicant publishing the station-group load forecast — in an assessment appendix released publicly, a distributor's rate or expansion filing, or a regional planning report that states the same forecast at the same grain. A subsequent addendum in this lineage that quantifies the exceedance would also close it.
This Big Question organizes the evidence: the commitments, the disagreements, the projections, and the gaps — and it states plainly where the evidence cannot yet reach. When Countability has a current answer, it appears separately on this page with its date, basis, limits, Brief and Receipt. The question stays open; the evidence keeps moving.
This page holds the current public record for this question. For a more specific question, see Work with Countability.
Work with Countability