World Clock / Canada / vs Netherlands

🇨🇦 Canada vs 🇳🇱 Netherlands

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Canada currently owes about 4.5× as much as the Netherlands — a gap of $2.20 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇨🇦
Canada
$2,831,314,104,597
Debt-to-GDP114%
Per citizen$68,337
Per second+$7,654
VS
🇳🇱
Netherlands
$635,958,335,740
Debt-to-GDP45%
Per citizen$35,077
Per second+$1,756
In nominal terms, Canada carries the larger government debt — roughly 4.5× that of the Netherlands, a difference of $2.20 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (Canada: 114%, Netherlands: 45%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Canada ranks 14th by debt-to-GDP and the Netherlands 89th. Measured per person, Canada is 5th and the Netherlands 22nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Canada ranks 9th and the Netherlands 18th among the 135 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 government debt in Canada is roughly 1.9× that in the Netherlands ($68,337 vs $35,077 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Canada sits at 114% of GDP, well above the Netherlands' 45%, 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 ($8K/sec vs $2K/sec for the Netherlands), adding roughly $509,587,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Canada's population (41M) is about 2.3× the Netherlands' (18M), 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.

Compare API ↗ 📑 Embed this counter

More Canada comparisons

Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2026, general government gross debt).
Live data: /api/compare?a=ca&b=nl · Canada page · Netherlands page
World debt map · Rankings · Insights · Privacy Cookie settings · Terms · Contact