Nearly every domain in this budget depends on the same small set of things: a way to establish who a person or a business is, a place to keep records and prove they have not been altered, a way to exchange data with another government, and a certificate another state will accept.
Alberta already runs a shared services operator, so most of what these services need is continuing provincial spending and is not counted again: citizen and business identity, the government network and endpoint estate, the records standard, the service desk and departmental security are funded today. What is counted here is the increment a state needs and a province never has - a country signing certificate authority without which no other state will accept an Alberta passport, a security operation at state rather than departmental scale, government-to-government exchange so customs, passenger, police, health and tax information can move under agreement, sovereign hosting so the record of government does not sit where another government controls it, and the authority that sets the standard and refuses a duplicating build.
The figures are a planning estimate. The complement and the loaded rate are firm; everything built on them is an order of magnitude, offered so that a layer every other domain depends on is not carried at zero.
C$ millions, fiscal 2026-27 price base. A one-time cost, a recurring cost and a payment to a member of the public are different things and are never added together.
How the figure is built
C$48.0M a year of added running cost and C$192.0M one-time, of which C$62.0M is capital, for the layer beneath every other domain. Alberta already runs a shared services operator, so most of what these services need is continuing provincial spending and is not counted here: citizen and business identity, the government network and endpoint estate, the records standard, the service desk and departmental security are funded today.
What is counted is the sovereign increment - the things a province has never needed and a state cannot do without.
Five of them.
A country signing certificate authority and document public key infrastructure, without which no other state will accept an Alberta passport.
A security operation at state rather than departmental scale.
Government-to-government exchange, so customs, passenger, police, health and tax information can move under agreement rather than by hand.
Sovereign hosting and continuity, so the record of government does not sit where another government controls it.
Assurance authority that sets the standard and refuses a duplicating build.
No architecture has been designed, no licensing has been quoted and no integration has been scoped. The complement and the loaded rate are firm; everything built on them is an order of magnitude offered so the function is not carried at zero.
The lines
| C$M | ||
|---|---|---|
| Sovereign hosting and continuity operations | 12.0 | Two sites, capacity and the continuity rehearsal |
| Licensing and subscriptions at state scale | 8.0 | Identity, security tooling and certificate management, priced for a state rather than a department |
| Exchange operation and integration maintenance | 5.0 | Each counterpart connection has to be kept working |
| Certificate authority operations, audit and cross-certification | 2.0 | The certificate is worth what the audit behind it is worth |
| ADDED RUNNING COST, a year | 48.0 | |
| Sovereign hosting and continuity build | 40.0 | Two sites |
| Exchange platform | 12.0 | The platform, not the integrations |
| Certificate and key hardware | 10.0 | Hardware security modules, held in two places |
| Capital | 62.0 | |
| Government-to-government exchange build and first five integrations | 45.0 | Customs, passenger, police, health and tax |
| Security operations centre stand-up | 22.0 | Tooling, playbooks and the round-the-clock rota |
| Country signing certificate authority and document PKI | 18.0 | Including accession to the international public key directory, which is granted and not declared |
| Identity, records and tamper-evidence standard | 12.0 | Written once and adopted by every domain |
| Programme management and assurance | 12.0 | 24-month stand-up across every domain at once |
| Recruitment and training | 10.0 | 140 specialists in a market where every buyer wants the same people |
| Assurance authority stand-up | 8.0 | Architecture, the standard, and the register of domain builds |
| Contingency at 15% | 25.0 | |
| ONE-TIME TOTAL | 192.0 |
The people
| Posts | C$M | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Country signing certificate authority and document PKI | 15 | The certificate another state accepts, without which the passport is paper | |
| Security operation at state scale | 55 | Round-the-clock, which is what drives the number | |
| Government-to-government exchange | 40 | Customs, passenger, police, health and tax information under agreement | |
| Sovereign hosting and continuity | 20 | Two sites, and the record of government held where Alberta controls it | |
| Assurance authority | 10 | The standard, the architecture, and the refusal of a duplicating build | |
| New permanent posts | 140 | ||
| Payroll | 21 | 140 posts at a C$150,000 loaded rate | |
| Complement carried | 140 permanent |
Comparators
| Figure | ||
|---|---|---|
| Payroll share of running cost | 43.8% at 140 posts | Low for a public body and right for an infrastructure operator, where licensing, hosting and tooling carry more of the cost than people do |
| Share of the budget's added running cost | 1.3% - C$48.0M against C$3,583.8M | C$3,583.8M is the added running cost of the other nineteen domains; with this domain's C$48.0M it makes the C$3,631.8M in the front table. A layer every domain depends on, at well under two per cent of what the domains cost to run. |
| Cost if each domain builds its own instead | not estimated, and higher | The claim made here is only the direction: twenty identity stores, twenty exchanges and twenty security operations cost more than one of each and do not interoperate. |
What these figures assume
- The operator already exists. Alberta runs a shared services function today, and this is the increment a state needs on top of it rather than a new organisation.
- Domains consume these services and do not rebuild them. The business system, its rules, its caseload and its people stay with the domain; the layer beneath is counted once, here.
- The authority to refuse a duplicating domain build sits with the Government of Alberta's transition governance function and ends at Constitutional Commencement, after which the standard is enforced the way any other government standard is.
- These are constructed planning figures, not derived costs. The architecture, licensing and integration work that would turn them into derived costs belongs to the design phase, and the estimate is restated when that work completes.
How this connects to other domains
The services are operated by the ministry holding provincial shared services, not by the transition governance function: they are permanent functions of statehood and do not lapse at Transition End, so an authority whose delegated powers end at Constitutional Commencement is the wrong operator. That function holds the authority alone - the architecture, the standard, and the power to refuse a duplicating domain build - and that authority ends at Commencement.
Every domain consumes these services and none of them re-costs them: the business system, its rules, its caseload and its people stay with the domain, and the identity, records, exchange, certificate, hosting and security layers beneath them are counted once, here.
The country signing certificate authority serves the passport at Immigration; the exchange serves customs at Border and Customs, passenger data at Immigration, police records at Policing and Public Safety, health information at Health and tax information at Taxation and Revenue.
Sources
- Alberta Transition Plan supporting analysis, Transitional Matters, section 1.8 common digital and shared services.
- The function list and the two-role split are the paper's own; the money is constructed here.
