What Is Not in the Headline C$20-30 Billion

Costs that sit outside the headline

Each of the following could carry a cost that is not inside the headline range. Where a figure can be put on it, the figure is given.

• Any negotiated net share of federal debt and federal assets. The main stress case shows C$6.2 billion a year of debt service and Section 10 shows additional sensitivities.
• Any negotiated share of federal public-sector pension plan deficits. The School of Public Policy report raises this as a possible settlement liability and declines to include it because the outcome is too uncertain to estimate; this paper takes the same view. It would be a settlement item rather than an annual running cost, and it is listed here so that it is disclosed rather than discovered [SPP-26].
• Defence initial capitalisation beyond the C$58.2 million of transition setup already included. The equipment build-out is C$10.0 to C$16.5 billion over ten to fifteen years, an average of C$0.7 to C$1.6 billion a year against the C$0.9 to C$1.1 billion a year the mature budget already carries.
• Any Indigenous settlement beyond continuation funding. The C$1.5-2.8 billion additional annual stress is a sensitivity only, not a settlement formula.
• Any one-time immigration setup above the C$196.7 million already contained in the transition ledger. The separate workload cross-check is C$200-300 million, so the potential additional upper-end exposure is about C$0.1 billion.
• Adverse pension exchange-rate or withholding-tax exposure pending future agreements.

Upside factors deliberately excluded

None of the following appears anywhere in the headline figures.

1. No investment uplift. No allowance is made for capital returning to Alberta under a more predictable regulatory regime, notwithstanding published estimates of investment deferred or lost.
2. No market-access gains. No benefit is assumed from improved access to markets beyond the United States, or from export capacity beyond what is already built or under construction.
3. No efficiency gains. Nothing is claimed from modern systems, simplified process or the reduction in administrative duplication that independence would permit.
4. No federal-asset windfall. Federal land, buildings, infrastructure, equipment, Crown corporation interests and financial assets located in or attributable to Alberta are valued at zero throughout.
5. No sovereign wealth growth effect. Returns from any expanded Heritage Fund are excluded from the current-day case, and appear only in the clearly-labelled long-term scenarios.
6. No first-quarter revenue upgrade. The provincial budget baseline is retained even though the later fiscal update was materially more favourable.
7. No currency benefit. No final currency, reserve or liquidity arrangement is assumed, and the effect described in Section 9 — under which a weaker dollar raises the domestic value of export revenue — is not counted in any total.