Who is here on Day 1
At 1 April 2026 Alberta had 261,031 non-permanent residents, about 5.2 per cent of the population [SC-121]. The number of non-citizen permanent residents is not published and is estimated at roughly 190,000 from recent admissions. Taken together, the planning population is about 450,000 non-citizens.
Most temporary residents need no special programme at all, because permits expire on their own. Alberta would honour every valid permit to its expiry date and then apply its own renewal rules. A permit that is not renewed usually ends with someone booking a flight, not with an enforcement officer at the door.
Selection rules for new economic applicants are a policy question and are not settled here. What the costing needs is volume: the paper assumes roughly 18,000 to 27,000 new admissions a year for workload planning, alongside employer-driven, family-reunification, temporary and refugee streams.
Everyone is re-examined, and settled lives are protected
- Every permanent resident would be re-examined. That is what the 190,000-case review costed below actually is: nobody carries status into the new country unexamined. Every valid temporary permit would be honoured to its expiry date, and its holder checked against the same standard at renewal or at their next application, with identity, criminality and security screening applied across the whole non-citizen population.
What re-examination tests is reasonable compliance with the terms on which status was granted: that the person is who they said they are, that there is no serious criminal or security record, and that the conditions of the permit have broadly been kept. It is not a re-run of a selection competition, and it is not a search for reasons to refuse. Canadian citizens ordinarily resident in Alberta on Independence Day would be dealt with under Alberta’s citizenship law rather than through any immigration process. Settled permanent residents, established work-permit holders, spouses and partners of Alberta citizens, and protected persons would be confirmed on that basis rather than required to re-qualify. Appendix D sets out the rules, and they are what bound the reassessment volumes used for costing.
Re-examination on this scale carries legal as well as fiscal exposure. Decisions affecting settled residents engage the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or its successor instrument, and would be open to judicial review, which is why the costing carries an explicit error and legal reserve rather than an administrative fee alone. The design questions that exposure raises belong to the Transition Plan; what is costed here is the workload and the reserve.
Reassessment and removals: use real-world capacity
The model reassesses the estimated 190,000 permanent residents over three years, about 63,000 cases a year. The working refusal range is 1,650 to 3,180 a year, but refusal is not the same as forced removal. Using Canadian capacity as a comparator, the model assumes 800 to 2,000 enforced removals a year. Appendix D shows the refusal method, removal comparators and full cost build-up.
What is carried in the fiscal model
| Costing input | Planning value |
|---|---|
| Non-permanent residents, 1 April 2026 | 261,031 [SC-121] |
| Estimated non-citizen permanent residents | ~190,000 |
| New admissions used for workload planning | 18,000-27,000 a year |
| Permanent residents reassessed | ~63,000 a year for three years |
| Expected refusals from reassessment | 1,650-3,180 a year |
| Serious-criminality removals | 130-200 a year |
| Enforced removals actually executed | 800-2,000 a year |
| Reassessment, screening, adjudication and enforcement allowance | C$237-375M a year |
| One-time immigration setup cross-check | C$200-300M |
What the transition already does for immigration
The transition budget already includes C$196.7 million of one-time immigration setup, including C$72 million of capital [BA].
The annual reassessment, screening, adjudication and enforcement allowance is C$237 to C$375 million, rounded to C$0.2 to C$0.4 billion in the fiscal ledger. It covers the three-year reassessment of permanent residents together with the ordinary screening and adjudication caseload, including compliance checks on temporary permits as they come up for renewal. No separate mass review of the temporary cohort is assumed or costed.
Appendix D provides the detail.
