Health, Education and Existing Services

Most public-facing services are already delivered by provincial or municipal institutions. The hospital, the school, the university, the highway, the courthouse, the land titles office, the police car, the water coming out of the tap, the bin at the curb. Alberta and its municipalities already run every one of them. None of that has to be rebuilt. What changes is the money flow with Ottawa, plus the federal-tier jobs listed in Appendix F that Alberta would pick up.

Transfers are financing, not duplicate services

The Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer are real money, but they do not buy a single federal hospital or school sitting alongside Alberta's. The transfers are a cheque, and on independence the cheque stops arriving at the same moment the associated federal tax revenue no longer accrues to the federal government. Which is why counting both the lost transfer and the whole existing service as new costs of independence charges Albertans twice for the same thing.

What Alberta already runs