Here’s how the federal government could have saved money printing the budget: 

It could have bought 1,000 top of the line, all-in-one printers at retail price. 

Then it could have bought 10,000 multi-packs of colour ink.

Along with 106,000 reams of paper.

And then it could have assigned one of the 108,000 new bureaucrats hired under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to print out copies of the budget. 

Or it could have bought more than 333,000 USB flash drives and handed out digital copies to anyone who wanted to read it. 

And even after this epic office supply shopping spree, Ottawa would have saved a million dollars.

Instead, Ottawa blew $4.3 million on printing the federal budget since 2015. 

In fact, the government continues to spend half-a-million dollars a year printing paper copies of the budget, more than a decade after authorizing the transition to digital-only publications, according to documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. 

“It’s 2024, presumably the government isn’t still using carrier pigeons, so it probably doesn’t need to spend half-a-million dollars printing paper copies of its budget every year,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Not only are taxpayers getting soaked by what’s in the budget, we’re also getting a six-figure tab just to print it out.”

On average, the federal government spends $482,000 annually printing out thousands of copies of its budget, despite the fact the government has been trumpeting its embrace of the digital economy for years. 

The costliest year on record was 2023, when the Trudeau government spent $753,160 printing 4,200 copies of the federal budget, according to the records. 

That was $443,370 more than the Conservatives spent in 2015, the last year in which the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper tabled a budget. 

The least expensive year on record was 2021, when the government spent $215,434 printing copies of its budget. 

Cost of printing the federal budget, 2015 to 2024, access-to-information records

Given the number of copies the government prints each year, the federal budget would constitute a best seller in the Canadian publishing industry, according to BookNet Canada. 

The average cost for each copy of the budget is $110. 

In 2012, the Harper government authorized federal departments to transition to online-only publications, estimating the move would save taxpayers $178 million annually.

Federal documents, including the budget, are routinely made available for free on government websites. 

“The government proved in 2021 that it could bring printing costs down, so taxpayers expect that to happen every year moving forward,” Terrazzano said. “Printing some physical copies is understandable, but an average tab of half-a-million-dollars is silly.”

Since 2015, the federal government printed 39,218 physical copies of the budget. 

According to online calculations, roughly 1,460 standard pine trees would have been cut down to produce that volume of paper.

The Trudeau government is more than 1.8 billion trees short of its promise to plant two billion trees by 2030.