An Alberta Independence Price Tag, and the Costs Critics Say It Skips

An organization advocating Alberta independence has released a report that tries to put a number on what sovereignty might cost — the latest in a line of estimates attempting to price out the whole affair. The interesting part is the shape of the objection rather than the arithmetic: critics say the report leaves out major expenses, naming military spending, Indigenous supports, and Alberta's share of the federal debt. Each of those is a large, negotiated, and genuinely contested line item, which is the recurring problem with any provincial exit budget. Whether the number is comfortable or alarming depends almost entirely on which obligations get counted, and the critics' complaint is precisely that this one counts too few.