Why Hasn't Alberta Been Calculating the Cost of Separation?

Six months before a referendum, the UCP still hasn't provided an analysis. … Article written by Charles Rusnell.
About a year ago, Lennie Kaplan started filing freedom of information requests to the United Conservative Party government of Premier Danielle Smith.
Kaplan wanted to see what, if any, cost-benefit analysis Smith's UCP was conducting in relation to the province's potential separation from Canada.
As a former mid-level manager with the Alberta Treasury Board and Finance Ministry for about a decade, Kaplan, who left government in 2023, had conducted many analyses of the potential economic and fiscal effects of various government policies.
Based on that experience, he knew it was critical to forecast and publicize the enormous impact secession could have on the province's economy and its people.
"I never got anything back," said Kaplan, who received the response to his last request in May. "They kept saying they had no records."
At a news conference Monday, a journalist asked Smith if the government would produce a document that detailed the costs of a potential independent Alberta. It was as if she had been waiting for the question.
Smith said there would be a document produced by August and, unprompted, she reeled off a list of the daunting costs and obligations if the province were to secede from Canada.
"As you can see, it is a pretty extensive list that has probably hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of startup costs, and people need to understand that about what it would be to set up a fully functional national government from scratch," she told reporters.
The about-face by Smith is whiplash inducing. While Smith has consistently maintained she supports a sovereign Alberta within Canada, for more than a year her incessant grievance rhetoric, policies and legislative agenda have promoted and normalized the ideology underpinning the province's separatist movement.
Last July, the UCP lowered the threshold for a citizen-initiated referendum, which directly assisted a petition to force a referendum on independence organized by the pro-separatist Alberta Prosperity Project.
When a judge halted the Alberta Prosperity Project petition by ruling it violated Indigenous treaty rights, Smith circumvented the court by ordering a referendum be held on Oct. 19. A convoluted 37-word question will ask Albertans if they want to stay in Canada or hold another binding referendum on whether to start the legal process to leave.
The Opposition NDP and several columnists have skewered Smith for what they view as her politically self-interested attempt to appease a significant faction of separatists within the UCP, some of whom are threatening to depose her — as they did her predecessor, Jason Kenney.
Mount Royal University political scientist Lori Williams said Smith finally has been forced to take a side.
"Danielle Smith was trying to have it both ways: trying to keep the separatists from challenging her leadership, trying to keep them from splitting off and creating a new party and trying to stay onside with the federalists."
"But she has finally realized that she has to take a stand," Williams said.
Or perhaps she has realized, Williams said, that the separatist leaders who have been threatening a coup — Jeff Rath, Mitch Sylvestre, David Parker and others associated with the Alberta Prosperity Project — "are not as influential or as well organized or connected as they have claimed."
"And so maybe she thinks she can get away with taking a stand now, as many have suggested she would have been forced to eventually," Williams said.
Smith has also been under "tremendous pressure" from business groups, Williams said, including the powerful Calgary Chamber of Commerce, which represents major oil and gas corporations.
In a recent news release, the chamber said Calgary's business community had consistently raised concerns about the referendum "because of the profound economic uncertainty and damage it will inflict on the province."
"Wh...