World Clock / Canada / vs Switzerland

🇨🇦 Canada vs 🇨🇭 Switzerland

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Canada currently owes about 6.3× more — a gap of $2.30 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.

🇨🇦
Canada
$2,730,947,963,960
Debt-to-GDP114%
Per citizen$68,103
Per second+$4,538
VS
🇨🇭
Switzerland
$431,970,858,863
Debt-to-GDP39%
Per citizen$49,088
Per second+$958
In nominal terms, Canada carries the larger government debt — roughly 6.3× that of Switzerland, a difference of $2.30 trillion. Note that debt-to-GDP (Canada: 114%, Switzerland: 39%) is the better measure of sustainability than the raw total.

Analysis

By total government debt, Canada ranks 9th-largest and Switzerland ranks 25th-largest among the 137 sovereigns tracked on this site.

On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the national debt in Canada is roughly 1.4× that in Switzerland ($68,103 vs $49,088 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Canada sits at 114% of GDP, well above Switzerland's 39%, meaning Canada owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The gap between them is widening: Canada's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($5K/sec vs $958/sec for Switzerland), adding roughly $309,312,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Canada's population (40M) is about 4.6× Switzerland's (9M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.

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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026, general government gross debt) and World Bank IDS.
Live data: /api/compare?a=ca&b=ch · Canada page · Switzerland page
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