Canada's Plans Show Federal IT Spending Falling. Actual Spending Has Beaten Plan Five Years Running.

Updated 24 September 2026 with the 2026–2027 Departmental Plans. The plan-versus-actual record is unchanged, because no newer actuals have been published; the forward trajectory, the staffing mix and a new test of the newest plan are refreshed.

The forecast that is sitting there for free

Every federal department publishes a Departmental Plan each spring, alongside or shortly after the Main Estimates and normally before the fiscal year starts, and inside it, for every programme, three years of planned spending and three years of planned full-time equivalents (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a). Anyone can download the whole government's worth. The 2025–2026 plans, delayed by the spring 2025 election, were scheduled for tabling in June 2025 (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2025); the 2026–2027 plans are now published (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026c).

For a vendor, that looks like the thing you would pay a research firm for: a named-buyer demand forecast, published, two to three years ahead of any tender.

So read it. Taking only the programme lines that pass the information-technology rule set out under How we came up with those numbers below, the 2026–2027 plans give 36 organizations 84 IT programme lines, worth CA$5.40 billion in the plan year and CA$5.29 billion two years out. That is a CA$115.00 million reduction, down 2.1%, while planned IT headcount falls 5.5% (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d). The open dataset used for the history below still ends at the 2025–2026 plans, so the 2026–2027 figures come from GC InfoBase's own program files, which carry the same data ahead of the portal copy.

Planned federal IT spending, 2026–2027 Departmental Plans, 36 organizations

• 2026–2027CA$5.40B
• 2027–2028CA$5.34B
• 2028–2029CA$5.29B

Thirty of those 36 organizations plan to spend less. Of the six that plan to spend more, five also plan to add IT staff, and the sixth, the Department of Justice, trims its IT headcount by 0.6% (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d). On its face this is a flat-to-shrinking market, and last year's plans told the same story more loudly: the 2025–2026 edition ran from CA$5,078.65 million down to CA$4,539.33 million, a 10.6% fall (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a).

It is also mostly wrong, and the same file proves it.

The spine. A Departmental Plan is prepared from the Main Estimates, so its figures precede the in-year funding decisions that follow. Check the plans against published actuals and the gap is large and consistently positive: across 448 IT programme lines over five fiscal years, departments planned CA$21.86 billion and actually spent CA$26.81 billion — 22.7% more, with actuals beating plan in every single year and on 334 of 448 individual lines (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a). The apparent cut in any one plan is mostly an artifact of when the document is written. In my experience vendors read the plan as a demand forecast, and that misread under-sizes total federal IT spending by nearly a fifth. Not all of that gap is purchasing: actual IT headcount also ran 12.1% above plan over the same lines.

The control, on one programme

Start with a single line you can check by hand. The Canada Revenue Agency's Information Technology Services programme appears in all seven Departmental Plans from 2020–2021 to 2026–2027, five of them with published actuals beside them. The four most recent are below; in the three earlier years the overshoot was larger still, at +68.4%, +64.0% and +22.2% (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a):

Departmental Plan	Planned, plan year	Actual	Variance
2023–2024	CA$429.52M	CA$539.70M	+25.7%
2024–2025	CA$422.13M	CA$527.36M	+24.9%
2025–2026	CA$386.06M	not yet published	—
2026–2027	CA$407.53M	not yet published	—

(Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a, 2026d)

Two things were happening at once. The three plans to 2025–2026 each forecast a lower number than the one before — CA$429.52M, then CA$422.13M, then CA$386.06M — and each measured actual landed about a quarter above the plan it belongs to. A vendor comparing the 2023–2024 and 2025–2026 plans saw the plan-year figure fall 10% in two editions. The 2026–2027 plan then broke the run: the 2025–2026 plan had put CRA's IT line at CA$373.97M for 2026–2027, and the new plan puts it at CA$407.53M, 9.0% higher (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a, 2026d). A vendor reading the actuals saw a department that spent over half a billion dollars in each of the last two measured years.

The plan is not lying. It answers one question — what had been approved when it was prepared — and gets read as though it answered a second Sagentix GTM Methodology, 2026.

The pattern holds across the whole file

One programme is an anecdote. Here is every federal IT programme line where a plan-year figure and a published actual both exist:

Fiscal year	Lines	Planned	Actual	Variance
2020–2021	93	CA$3.89B	CA$4.94B	+26.9%
2021–2022	89	CA$3.94B	CA$5.02B	+27.4%
2022–2023	92	CA$4.62B	CA$5.37B	+16.1%
2023–2024	88	CA$4.58B	CA$5.78B	+26.1%
2024–2025	86	CA$4.82B	CA$5.71B	+18.5%
All five	448	CA$21.86B	CA$26.81B	+22.7%

(Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a)

Five years, five overshoots, a range of 16.1% to 27.4%. The median individual programme line spends 1.247 times its plan. Of 448 lines, 334 exceeded plan and 114 came in under (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a). One of the 334, the Treasury Board Secretariat's Canadian Digital Service in 2020–2021, was planned at zero, so the median is taken over the other 447. This is not a few outliers dragging an average — it is the ordinary case.

What would change my mind. A single year of actuals landing below plan across the file, or a mechanism that explains the gap as something other than in-year funding — a systematic re-mapping of programme lines between the plan and the results report, for instance — would break this. The dataset's own explanations add a caution: of the 334 over-plan lines, 49 cite a reallocation and 43 cite collective agreements, so part of the gap is money moved inside a department or paid as wages rather than new buying. I checked re-mapping by holding programme names constant across vintages, which is how the CRA row above was built. I cannot rule out re-mapping in every one of the 448 lines, and I would treat a single-line comparison more cautiously than the five-year aggregate.

The newest plan, tested before a dollar is spent

The 2026–2027 actuals will not be published until late 2027, but the newest plan can already be tested against the one before it. Every Departmental Plan carries figures for the two years after its plan year, so each year is planned twice before it starts: once as an out-year, once as the plan year. If the plans held only approved money and approvals keep arriving, the second figure should be higher.

Fiscal year	Previous plan's figure	This plan's figure	Revision
2021–2022	CA$3,584.02M	CA$3,942.45M	+10.0%
2022–2023	CA$3,569.43M	CA$4,621.58M	+29.5%
2023–2024	CA$4,013.11M	CA$4,581.81M	+14.2%
2024–2025	CA$4,205.88M	CA$4,817.14M	+14.5%
2025–2026	CA$4,631.35M	CA$5,078.65M	+9.7%
2026–2027	CA$5,025.11M	CA$5,403.15M	+7.5%

(Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a, 2026d)

Six editions, six upward revisions. The 2026–2027 row is the one that matters, because the 2026–2027 Main Estimates include "reductions approved as part of the Comprehensive Expenditure Review" (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026b). Those are decided cuts, not calendar artifacts. Even so, the plan that carries them puts federal IT CA$378.04 million above what the previous plan said for the same year. It is also the smallest revision of the six, so the review may be narrowing the gap rather than closing it; the 2026–2027 actuals will settle that.

The revision depends on one call in the rule below. Shared Services Canada's Data Centre Information Technology Operations line has no plan in the 2026–2027 edition; its work continues as Hosting Services, CA$801.95 million, a name no IT keyword matches. Counted as a successor, the revision is +7.5%. Left out, the same file shows an 8.4% cut, and a restructure would be misread as a decision to spend less (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a, 2026d).

How we came up with those numbers

The figures above are derived, not quoted, so the derivation is worth stating in full. Everything below is reproducible from the files themselves.

Where the data comes from. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat publishes Departmental Plans and Departmental Results Reports – Expenditures and Full Time Equivalents (FTE) by Program and by Organization in GC InfoBase – Open Datasets on the Open Government Portal (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a). It is one CSV, roughly 7,200 rows, carrying every federal programme with its planned spending and planned staff for three forward years, and its actual spending and actual staff for years already reported. On 24 September 2026 it still ended at the 2025–2026 plans. GC InfoBase's own program spending and staffing files carry the 2026–2027 plans (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d); GC InfoBase states that all its data is available in raw form on the Open Government Portal. Their plan columns are unlabelled, so I anchored them to fiscal years by matching the in-year column to the open dataset's 2025–2026 plan, and confirmed the result on the CRA line above.

The problem with the obvious method. Match programme names against IT keywords — information technology, information management, digital, cyber, ICT, technolog, data management, IT infrastructure, IM/IT, data and analytics, chief information officer, enterprise architecture and enterprise services — and you get an answer in an afternoon. It is also wrong, and measurably so. That keyword list accepts Bridging Digital Divides (a broadband subsidy), Biotechnology and Genomics, Quantum and Nanotechnologies and a student internship stream, because their names contain digital, technolog or cyber. Run against the 2026–2027 plan year it produces CA$7.34 billion across 94 lines in 37 organizations. Roughly CA$2.74 billion of that is not information technology (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d).

How the rubric was tested. A count from a keyword match is only as good as the match, so the match was tested in both directions. Eight programme names it must accept — Information Technology Services, Data Centre Information Technology Operations, Workplace Technologies, Operational IM/IT Services, Digital Government Program, Cyber Operations, Information Management Services, and Defence's ICT systems acquisition line — all matched. Nine near-misses drawn from what the match actually returned, every one of which should have been rejected, all matched too. Nine of nine over-matched. The rubric was too wide, and nothing in its output said so.

The correction, and where it came from. The same file carries a second field the keyword method never reads: the department's own core_responsibility, its classification of the enduring function each programme serves. It does not settle the question by itself; National Defence's cyber lines, for instance, sit under force and procurement responsibilities. I used it as evidence for case-by-case exclusions, each a judgement you can review. In the 2026–2027 plan year, eleven lines match the name keyword, are filed by their department under something that is not information technology, and are not IT on inspection:

Excluded programme	Organization	Filed under	2026–2027 plan
Science, Technology and Innovation	National Defence	Future Force Design	CA$868.14M
Bridging Digital Divides	ISED	People, Skills and Communities	CA$818.78M
Research and Technology Partnerships	NSERC	Funding Natural Sciences and Engineering Research and Training	CA$470.14M
Energy Innovation and Clean Technology	Natural Resources Canada	Innovative and Sustainable Natural Resources Development	CA$341.50M
Quantum and Nanotechnologies	National Research Council	Science and Innovation	CA$92.77M
Collaborative Science, Technology and Innovation Program	National Research Council	Science and Innovation	CA$66.16M
Digital Technologies	National Research Council	Science and Innovation	CA$45.12M
Science and Technology Internship (Green Jobs)	Natural Resources Canada	Globally Competitive Natural Resource Sectors	CA$15.09M
Science and Technology	Canadian High Arctic Research Station	Polar Science and Knowledge	CA$13.29M
Clean Technology and Clean Growth	ISED	Companies, Investment and Growth	CA$3.11M
Biotechnology and Genomics	Fisheries and Oceans Canada	Fisheries	CA$2.62M

(Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d)

One line goes the other way. Shared Services Canada's Hosting Services (CA$801.95M), filed under "Common Government of Canada Information Technology (IT) Operations", is counted as the successor of the data-centre line described above. The arithmetic closes: CA$7,337.92M from the raw match, less CA$2,736.72M excluded, plus CA$801.95M included, is the CA$5,403.15M plan year (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d).

Two defects this method produced, and how they were caught. The exclusion list was first written naming one organization as Polar Knowledge Canada — its operating name. The dataset files it as the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, so that exclusion matched no row and silently did nothing: the 2025–2026 plan-year total came out CA$13.58M and 25 FTEs too high. It was caught by checking the corrected total against a second, independently derived figure. The same thing happened again with the 2026–2027 files, which spell the Green Jobs internship line with a dash where the open dataset uses parentheses; the old exclusion matched nothing, and CA$15.09 million slipped back in until every exclusion was checked for a match. A keyword that matches nothing is not an error, so neither defect produced a message (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d).

What is counted, and what is not. The figures cover IT programme lines the department files as such. They exclude IT bought inside programmes named something else — most of Shared Services Canada's telecommunications, connectivity and security lines among them — and they exclude the 54 organizations with a 2026–2027 plan that report no IT programme line at all. This is the visible part of federal IT spending, not the whole of it — CA$5.40 billion planned is a floor, and anyone quoting it as the federal IT market should say so.

Why the gap is one-directional

The mechanism I would offer is the timing, and I want to be clear that this part is my reading rather than something the dataset states. Departmental Plans are prepared from the Main Estimates and normally tabled in the spring, before or early in the fiscal year they describe; the 2025–2026 plans were scheduled for tabling in June 2025 (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2025). Money approved after that point — supplementary estimates, budget measures, carry-forwards from a prior year, in-year reallocations — is absent from the document, because it does not exist yet.

That produces exactly the shape observed: a plan figure that is complete as at publication, an actual that includes everything added later, and a gap that runs in one direction because funding is far more often added than clawed back mid-year. It also explains why the out-years fall, and why each new edition raises them. Year two and year three of a plan can only contain money already approved for those years, and most of what will eventually be spent then has not been approved when the document goes to print Sagentix GTM Methodology, 2026.

The practical consequence is a rule. Read a plan-year figure as a floor. Read an out-year figure as a floor with more of the funding still missing. Never subtract one from the other and call the difference a cut. The rule has one bound: a reduction the government has decided, like the Comprehensive Expenditure Review's, is a real cut, and it shows up as a smaller upward revision rather than as a fall in the out-years.

What the plan is actually good for

Discarding the file would be the second mistake. The level is unreliable; the mix is more useful, because the same document that under-states the dollars also states how many people the department plans to have — and the staffing line does not move the way the spending line does. Staffing overshoots too (actual IT headcount ran 12.1% above plan across the 448 lines), so read the ratio for direction, not as a measurement.

This year the direction changed. In the 2025–2026 plans, 30 of 36 organizations planned to cut IT spending faster than IT staff, and 14 of the 35 that report IT staff held headcount within one percent of flat, or grew it, while the money fell: keep the people, squeeze what gets bought. In the 2026–2027 plans, IT headcount falls 5.5% against spending's 2.1%. Twenty-four of the 35 organizations that report IT staff still cut spending faster than staff, but only three hold headcount while the money falls: the Canada Border Services Agency, Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026a, 2026d).

The six largest dollar cuts in the 2026–2027 plans all reduce staff as well:

Organization	Planned spend change	Planned staff change	Dollar change
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada	−44.9%	−30.4%	−CA$137.68M
Shared Services Canada	−9.1%	−6.3%	−CA$125.23M
Public Services and Procurement Canada	−31.4%	−6.5%	−CA$39.07M
Employment and Social Development Canada	−24.6%	−14.8%	−CA$34.81M
Correctional Service Canada	−20.2%	−5.5%	−CA$19.53M
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada	−27.6%	−7.6%	−CA$16.59M

(Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d)

One organization is deliberately absent from the staffing counts. The Public Health Agency of Canada reports zero planned full-time equivalents against its IT programme lines — so it has no staffing ratio to compute, and any percentage change from a base of zero would be an artifact rather than a measurement.

For a vendor, the change is a sharper signal than any spend total. Last year the likeliest competitor in many federal accounts was the internal team, holding its people while the purchasing line fell. This year most departments plan to shed IT staff and money together, and the plan cannot say whether the work those people did will be bought, automated or dropped. My reading is that this is the question to put to each account before the renewal conversation, because the answer decides whether your line is the one that absorbs the work or the one that gets cut with it Sagentix GTM Methodology, 2026.

The organizations that plan to grow

Six of the 36 plan a higher IT spend at the end of the horizon than at the start. National Defence dominates, at +CA$361.70 million (+25.8%) with IT headcount up 0.8%. The other five are small: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at +CA$12.31 million (+3.6%), Elections Canada at +CA$3.50 million (+18.3%), the Canada Revenue Agency at +CA$1.61 million (+0.4%), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research at +CA$1.05 million (+8.3%), and the Department of Justice at +CA$0.15 million (+0.7%) (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2026d).

Given the +22.7% plan-to-actual gap, none of those is a reliable estimate of what will be spent. What they show is intent recorded in a public document at a moment when 30 peers recorded the opposite — which, on a target list, is worth more than the dollar figure attached to it.

Where this fits in how I work

Every forward-looking public-sector figure gets a plan-versus-actual check here before it reaches a client, and this one is why. The check turned a striking headline into an artifact of the appropriation calendar — which is the ordinary outcome of running a control, and the reason to run one on the number you like most.

Every Sagentix Phase 01 federal analysis now reports planned figures with their historical realisation rate attached, rather than as forecasts — because a public-sector demand number that has never been tested against outturn is a claim about a document, not about a market Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence, 2026. The full delivery system runs 6–8 weeks, draws on 1,425 curated artifacts, and is priced from CA$4,500 for Phase 1 to CA$45,000 for a full go-to-market build, depending on scope — with a Phase 1 money-back guarantee (subject to terms).

The basic check needs no engagement: a plan column and an actual column, once the IT lines are chosen.

Three ways to act on this

Compute the realisation rate for your own target accounts. Pull the expenditure file, take the programmes you sell into, and for every year with both a plan-year figure and a published actual, divide one by the other. You will get a number per department. Multiply future plan figures by it before any of them reach a board slide or a territory model. For federal IT as a whole that multiplier is about 1.23; for your accounts it will differ, and knowing by how much is the entire exercise.

Stop treating out-year declines as demand signals. A plan's third year is structurally incomplete — it contains only money already approved that far ahead — and each new edition has raised it. If your pipeline model discounts an account because its plan shows a fall, you are modelling the appropriation calendar rather than the buyer. Model the level from actuals, and use the plan for direction only.

Read the staffing column beside every spending column. The plan's most reliable content is the ratio between the two. Where headcount holds and spending falls, expect procurement pressure, renewal scrutiny and insourcing conversations. Where headcount falls faster than spending, as it does in most of the 2026–2027 plans, ask who will do the work those people did. That is worth a structured market-intelligence pass when several accounts move at once; it is a Phase 01 engagement, and I would reach for it after the first two, which cost an afternoon.

Canada publishes its buying intentions three years ahead, for free, in a machine-readable file. In my experience few vendors read it, and those who do read it as a forecast — which is the one thing it is not.

What realisation rate does your federal pipeline model assume — and has anyone ever checked it against outturn?

References

• Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2025). 2025–26 Estimates. Government of Canada.
• Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2026a). Departmental Plans and Departmental Results Reports – Expenditures and Full Time Equivalents (FTE) by Program and by Organization [Data set]. In GC InfoBase – Open Datasets. Open Government Portal, Government of Canada. Open Government Licence – Canada. Re-derived 24 September 2026 from the CKAN datastore distribution, resource 64774bc1-c90a-4ae2-a3ac-d9b50673a895. Plan-versus-actual figures use all 448 information-technology programme lines from 2020–2021 to 2024–2025 that carry both a plan-year figure and a published actual.
• Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2026b). 2026–27 Estimates. Government of Canada.
• Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2026c). Departmental Plans. Government of Canada.
• Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2026d). GC InfoBase [Program spending and full-time equivalents data files, updated 23 September 2026]. Government of Canada. Forward-trajectory figures use the 2026–2027 Departmental Plan vintage across 84 information-technology programme lines in 36 organizations.

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. That licence covers the GC InfoBase expenditure data used throughout. Text from the Treasury Board web pages cited here is quoted for commentary and is not covered by that licence.