The Value of Freedom, published in 2025, asked the same broad question: could an independent Alberta pay its bills and improve its fiscal position?
It was an exploratory fiscal plan. This paper keeps the useful questions but separates the financial case from policy choices more sharply and replaces several assumptions with published data, transition costing and capacity-based estimates [VoF-25].
| Area | The Value of Freedom approach | Treatment in this paper and why it changed |
|---|---|---|
| Core fiscal case | Combined a broad fiscal plan with many policy proposals. | The fiscal ledger is proved first. Policy examples appear only where a function needs a cost or to illustrate possible use of surplus. |
| Federal-service replacement | Estimated broad service ranges. | Uses the completed transition-domain ledger and separates annual operations, payments to citizens and one-time setup. |
| Canada Pension Plan | Kept Alberta Pension Plan funding inside the pension system and stated that excess capacity could support replacement of federal seniors benefits, but the accounting firewall was not stated consistently in the combined fiscal tables. | Makes the firewall explicit. The Alberta Pension Plan funds Canada Pension Plan-equivalent benefits, Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement obligations assumed from the federal tier. Contributions and investment returns never enter general revenue, and these retirement-income payments never draw on general revenue. Existing Alberta public-sector plans remain separate. |
| Indigenous matters | Explored detailed land, funding and sovereignty settlement structures. | Day 1 costing simply continues current federal programme funding. A larger settlement is a stress sensitivity; treaty outcomes are left to negotiation. |
| Immigration | Applied broad re-screening and assumed removal volumes that could reach tens of thousands a year. | Temporary permits expire normally, settled families and established residents receive grandfathering routes, permanent residents are reassessed over three years, and enforced removals are capped by real-world Canadian capacity at 800-2,000 a year. |
| Immigration enforcement cost | Used much higher removal unit costs and therefore a very large deportation bill. | Uses published Canadian removal costs of C$3,840 unescorted and C$12,880 escorted, then separately budgets detention, appeals, legal aid and an error reserve. |
| Defence | Carried roughly C$3-5B annual defence and C$1-2B setup. | Uses a posture-based mature benchmark of about 1.05% of GDP, approximately C$5.0B, plus an explicit C$10.0-16.5B equipment build-out. The transition budget already includes C$58.2M of initial defence setup. |
| Environment | Developed a detailed environmental and carbon strategy. | Carries only C$0.2-0.5B of additional sovereign stewardship cost. No carbon-credit revenue or emissions offset is needed for the fiscal case. |
| Taxes | Presented large tax reductions as part of the future plan. | Tax changes are illustrations of what fiscal capacity could fund. The full tax programme is acknowledged not to fit immediately at the conservative end. |
| Long-term future | Used one aggressive growth path, including oil production rising to about 9.5 million barrels a day by 2045. | Uses three economic cases from Current Path to High-Growth Build-Out. The upper oil case is 7.0 million barrels a day and is explicitly an upside boundary, not a forecast. |
The result is intentionally more explicit about what belongs inside the pension system and what belongs in the government budget. The fiscal headline now uses the Alberta Pension Plan treatment in Section 6, while the fallback case shows that even a delayed pension settlement would not overturn viability. The central conclusion still does not depend on mass removals, a particular Indigenous settlement, an economic boom or a specific tax programme.
