policyengine-canada

PolicyEngine Canada domain knowledge

Canada is the exception to the standard PolicyEngine stack. Read this before writing any Canadian analysis — the entry points and the limits are different from the US/UK.

Verified against policyengine-canada 0.99.0 (2026-07), installed standalone. Do not hardcode benefit amounts; look them up live (below), because provincial and federal parameters re-index every year.

Two hard constraints

1. pe.ca does not exist. The policyengine wrapper ships US and UK only; there is no pe.ca. Use the policyengine_canada package directly.

import policyengine as pe
assert not hasattr(pe, "ca")   # Canada is not in the policyengine wrapper

2. Canada is household-only — there is no representative microdata. The package ships a small synthetic template, not a survey-weighted population sample. So you cannot run population microsimulation, and you cannot produce national program costs, revenue estimates, caseloads, or poverty rates for Canada. If asked "what would this cost nationally" or "how many families benefit," say that population estimates are not available for Canada and offer a household example. What you can do: compute taxes/benefits for a specific family, compare baseline vs. reform for that family, sweep it across an income range, and compare provinces.

One household calculation

Install the package on its own (it is not in the shared analysis venv), then build a situation and use policyengine_canada.Simulation. Values below verified against 0.99.0.

uv pip install policyengine-canada

from policyengine_canada import Simulation

sim = Simulation(situation={
    "people": {
        "parent1": {"age": {"2026": 35}, "employment_income": {"2026": 45_000}},
        "parent2": {"age": {"2026": 33}, "employment_income": {"2026": 20_000}},
        # full_custody defaults to False, which HALVES the CCB (see gotcha below):
        "child1": {"age": {"2026": 4}, "full_custody": {"2026": True}},
        "child2": {"age": {"2026": 9}, "full_custody": {"2026": True}},
    },
    "households": {"household": {
        "members": ["parent1", "parent2", "child1", "child2"],
        "province_code": {"2026": "ONT"},   # note: "ONT" for Ontario, "QC" for Quebec
    }},
})
assert round(float(sim.calculate("child_benefit", 2026)[0]), 2) == 11_030.75   # federal CCB
assert float(sim.calculate("adjusted_family_net_income", 2026)[0]) == 65_000    # AFNI