Sources and method

Dataset: The five-year statistical review printed in each Statement of Financial Information: revenue by source, expenses by service and by kind of cost, 2015–2025.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, in its yearly Statement of Financial Information, which British Columbia’s Financial Information Act requires. vancouver.ca refuses scripted requests, so each Statement is read, and linked, from its Internet Archive copy: every Statement read ↓

Our use: Each year is read from the newest Statement that prints it, since later reports restate earlier years. Every section is added up and set against the total printed under it.

Latest year: 2025

Good to know: These are actual results for the year, not the budget Council adopts. The City marks the review unaudited.

Latest Statement archived July 13, 2026.

Dataset: The debt table, the reserves and the balance sheet of the same five-year review, 2015–2025.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, in its yearly Statement of Financial Information, which British Columbia’s Financial Information Act requires. vancouver.ca refuses scripted requests, so each Statement is read, and linked, from its Internet Archive copy: every Statement read ↓

Our use: The table’s own arithmetic is checked every year: debenture debt less what the City holds itself is external debt; less the sinking fund, net debt.

Latest year: 2025

Good to know: What the debt costs each year comes from expenses by kind of cost, in the same review.

Latest Statement archived July 13, 2026.

Dataset: The supplier payments schedule and the grant schedules of each Statement of Financial Information, 2011–2025.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, in its yearly Statement of Financial Information, which British Columbia’s Financial Information Act requires. vancouver.ca refuses scripted requests, so each Statement is read, and linked, from its Internet Archive copy: every Statement read ↓

Our use: Each schedule’s lines are added up and compared with the total the City printed under it. Spellings of one payee are joined only after review; other public bodies are shown apart.

Latest year: 2025

Good to know: The amounts are what was paid in the year, not what a contract is worth. Suppliers paid less than the schedule’s threshold are one line. A name that could be a person’s is counted, never printed.

Latest Statement archived July 13, 2026.

Dataset: The register of awarded contracts: each competition, the bids it received and the award, one row per response.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: Awarded contracts ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver)

Our use: Responses are grouped by competition. Award totals are checked at competition and at response level; an amount printed beside several winners is counted once.

Good to know: Awarded is not paid. What the City later paid each supplier is in the Statement’s payments schedule, on the Payees page.

Source updated July 23, 2026; our copy made September 13, 2026.

Dataset: The remuneration schedule: every employee paid over the schedule’s threshold, one row per person per year, 2008–2025.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: Employee remuneration and expenses (earning over $75,000) ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver)

Our use: Rows are added up by year, department, role and pay band. No name leaves the source.

Latest year: 2025

Good to know: The threshold has been the same every year, so as pay rises more people cross it. No police department appears among the schedule’s departments.

Source updated April 16, 2026; our copy made September 13, 2026.

Dataset: The capital budget file the City publishes for each budget year and its Capital Plan; capital additions from the five-year review of the Statement of Financial Information.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: 2021 new Multi-Year Capital Budget requests and 2021 Capital Expenditure Budget ↗ · 2022 new Multi-Year Capital Budget requests and 2022 Capital Expenditure Budget ↗ · 2023 Multi-Year Capital Project Budget requests and Capital Expenditure Budget ↗ · 2023-2026 Capital Plan and 2026 Capital Budget with proposed four-year Capital Plan allocations ↗ · 2024 Multi-Year Capital Project Budget requests and Capital Expenditure Budget ↗ · 2025 Multi-Year Capital Project Budget requests and Capital Expenditure Budget ↗ · 2026 Multi-Year Capital Project Budget requests and Capital Expenditure Budget ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver) · The City of Vancouver, in its yearly Statement of Financial Information, which British Columbia’s Financial Information Act requires. vancouver.ca refuses scripted requests, so each Statement is read, and linked, from its Internet Archive copy: every Statement read ↓

Our use: Budget and plan totals are kept to the dollar from the files to the page. Programs are grouped by the service the files give them.

Good to know: Two measures: what the City added to its assets in a finished year, and what Council adopted to spend. They are never added together.

Dataset: The register of non-market housing buildings: homes, clientele, operator, stage and the year each building was first occupied.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: Non-market housing ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver) · residents from Statistics Canada’s Census; payments to operators from the Statements of Financial Information.

Our use: Homes are counted by clientele. The register also counts them by design; both counts are kept and the buildings where they disagree are counted.

Good to know: The register lists the buildings standing today, so an early year shows today’s buildings that opened then, not the housing of that year.

Source updated September 1, 2026; our copy made September 13, 2026.

Dataset: The landmarks: places the City owns, runs or funds, each in only when a published record ties City money to it; and the City’s seven registers of places (community centres, cultural spaces, fire halls, libraries, non-market housing, parks, shelters).

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: Community centres ↗ · Cultural Spaces ↗ · Fire halls ↗ · Libraries ↗ · Non-market housing ↗ · Parks - polygon representation ↗ · Homeless shelter locations ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver)

Our use: A landmark’s amount adds two things: the grants the City paid to the organisation that runs it, as the Statements print them, and its works, counted once (capital budget programs and awarded contracts whose name names the place). Each amount opens its record.

Good to know: The landmarks are a selection, and it grows.

Dataset: The council voting record: every item council voted on, with its outcome and tally; the property-address register to place the addresses its agenda text names.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: Council voting records ↗ · Property addresses ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver)

Our use: One row per councillor per vote is folded to one row per item. An item is placed only when its address is found in the register, exactly, in a range, or on the same hundred block.

Good to know: Councillors’ individual votes are not in the downloadable table: tallies only.

Source updated May 8, 2026; our copy made September 13, 2026.

Dataset: Building outlines, the parcels’ year built and zoning, streets, lanes, parks and public trees from the City; heights and ground from national LiDAR.

Published by: The City of Vancouver, on its open-data portal: Building Footprints 2015 ↗ · Property tax report ↗ · Public streets ↗ · Public trees ↗ · Issued building permits ↗ · Council voting records ↗ (Open Government Licence - Vancouver)

Our use: Each shape is drawn from a published record and placed on its parcel; council decisions and building permits that name an address open from it.

Good to know: Every shape is a published record; nothing is modelled to fill a gap.

• Natural Resources Canada (HRDEM), BC-Lower_Mainland_2016-1m (DTM), gaps from VILLE_VANCOUVER-1m (2013) ↗ (Open Government Licence - Canada): bare-earth elevation, 1 m LiDAR, sampled at the 53.815 m node grid
• Natural Resources Canada (HRDEM), BC-Lower_Mainland_2016-1m (DSM + DTM) ↗ (Open Government Licence - Canada): WHERE the water is: the 2016 LiDAR's flat or return-less surface touching the shore, the City's 2013 survey's flattened water, and the strip between them and the shoreline (frame.water_mask); depth NOT measured
• Natural Resources Canada (HRDEM), BC-Lower_Mainland_2016-1m ↗ (Open Government Licence - Canada): median LiDAR height above ground over the outline (DSM − DTM, 1 m), measured by pipeline/scripts/ca_vancouver_city/measure_building_heights.py
• Natural Resources Canada, MRDEM-30 (DTM) ↗ (Open Government Licence - Canada): elevation averaged onto the surround cell, one byte over 0..zmax
• European Space Agency, ESA WorldCover 10 m 2021 v200 ↗ (CC BY 4.0): where the land and water are around the city, and what covers the land

The budget, debt and payments pages read the City's annual Statements. vancouver.ca refuses scripted requests, so each PDF is read from its Internet Archive capture — the date is the capture's — and its fingerprint is kept so the same bytes can be read again.

• Statement of Financial Information 2011 · archived September 10, 2015 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2012 · archived September 10, 2015 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2013 · archived November 21, 2014 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2014 · archived September 10, 2015 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2015 · archived July 15, 2016 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2016 · archived April 21, 2017 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2017 — supply management · archived July 12, 2018 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2018 — supply management · archived July 23, 2019 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2019 · archived April 4, 2020 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2020 · archived July 6, 2021 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2021 · archived July 5, 2022 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2022 · archived April 5, 2023 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2023 · archived April 17, 2024 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2024 · archived April 10, 2025 · City URL
• Statement of Financial Information 2025 · archived July 13, 2026 · City URL

36 datasets, read through the portal's API; the date is the City's own last update.

Open Government Licence - Vancouver

Each is a test in the pipeline (pipeline/tests/ca), run with every build of the data.

• Budget and debt: every section of the five-year review adds up to the total printed under it, year by year, within the table's own rounding.
• Revenue minus expenses equals the annual surplus the City printed, every year.
• Expenses by object and expenses by function, two tables of the same money, have the same total every year.
• The debt table's own arithmetic holds: debenture debt less internally held debt is external debt; less the sinking fund, net debt.
• Payments: each supplier and grant schedule's lines add up to the total the City printed, within $50, or the difference is listed below with what was measured.
• Investments: the capital budget and plan totals survive from the published files to the page, to the dollar.
• Contracts: award totals at competition level equal those at response level; an amount printed beside several winners of one competition counts once.
• Housing: the register's two unit counts (by clientele, by design) are both kept, and the buildings where they disagree are counted on the page.
• Privacy: no withheld name reaches the payee list, and no payroll figure covers fewer than 10 people where it would be one person's pay.

Misprints found in the City’s reports

• Statement of Financial Information 2023: The 2023 five-year table prints 2022 = $585,399k, 2021 = $354,977k: the 2021 and 2020 figures one column to the right. The 2023 statement's own discussion says capital additions were $455.0 million in 2022, and the 2021 and 2022 statements say $585.4 million in 2021 and $455.0 million in 2022.
• Statement of Financial Information 2024: Same shifted row as the 2023 report (2022 = $585,399k); the 2022 statement says $455.0 million in 2022.
• Statement of Financial Information 2025: Same shifted row as the 2023 report (2022 = $585,399k, 2021 = $354,977k); the 2021 and 2022 statements say $585.4 million in 2021 and $455.0 million in 2022.

Schedules whose lines do not reproduce the printed total

• 2013 · Other: Every line on the page was read; they add up to $10,000 less than the total the City printed under them.
• 2016 · Business Improvement Associations: The schedule prints no total for this category.
• 2016 · Other: The schedule prints no total for this category.
• 2018 · Suppliers over $25,000: Every amount on the schedule's pages was read and none is left over; they add up to $648,381 less than the total the City printed.
• 2021 · Suppliers over $25,000: Aramark Canada Ltd's amount is printed with its leading digits cut off (',541,678' in the PDF) and cannot be read; the other lines add up to $1,416,973 less than the printed total.
• 2022 · Suppliers over $25,000: Every amount on the schedule's pages was read and none is left over; they add up to $28,769 more than the total the City printed.

The remuneration schedule names every employee paid over $75,000. The payroll page publishes counts and totals by year, department, role and pay band only: medians and band totals are withheld for groups under 10 people, and roles held by fewer than 3 people are summed.

A name is published only when it carries an organisation marker (a legal form, a kind of body, a trade word). A name without one could be a person's: its amount is counted in every total, its name is not shown. "In Trust" and "Notary Public" are not markers: a trust account is published only when its holder's own name carries one.

No page on this site is about a person: council decisions are shown by outcome and tally, payees that could be people are not named, employees are counted.