By David Boles, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, St. Albert Gazette
If you ask Jeffrey Rath, the figures the premier’s office dropped about the cost of establishing an independent Alberta don’t seem remotely believable.
“I think the numbers are all silly,” he said. “We don’t believe Danielle’s (Premier Danielle Smith) numbers for a minute.”
Rath, a lawyer who lives in the Foothills south of Calgary, is one of the leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group seeking to see Alberta leave Canada and establish itself outside the boundaries of Confederation.
Rath, along with other members of the A.P.P like Mitch Sylvestre, has played a large role in collecting over 300,000 signatures on a petition in support of Alberta’s independence.
Those signatures have been delivered to Elections Alberta, but have yet to be certified by the independent elections agency based in Edmonton.
That petition played a large role in Premier Danielle Smith announcing in late May that voters will indeed have their say on Alberta’s place in Canada on Oct. 19, with a referendum question.
The question will be whether voters want Alberta to remain in Confederation or whether the provincial government should start down the legal path to a referendum on Alberta leaving Canada.
The UCP government has advised it will be costly.
“What is our share of the national debt? $170 billion, likely,” said Smith at a press conference earlier this week, who notes a document breaking down the full costs of Alberta going it alone should be coming well before August.
“We’d have to take over OAS (Old Age Security) and Child Tax Benefit,” said Smith. “We’d have to have border control. We’d have to have border stations at Saskatchewan and British Columbia and tariffs. We’d have to renegotiate all of our trade agreements all around the world and set up trade offices.”
And that’s far from it.
Smith also noted an independent Alberta would have to set up telecommunications services, as well as railway and banking regulation. That’s still just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the costs associated with establishing Alberta as an independent nation.
“It’s a pretty extensive list that has probably hundreds of billions worth of start-up costs. And people need to understand what it would be like to set up a fully functional national government from scratch,” said Smith.
As of June 25, 2025, CPP Investments reported that Canada’s national pension fund totalled over $731 billion. But according to the Alberta Prosperity Project’s document on the cost of Alberta separation, Alberta would get around $334 billion, as cited in a Lifeworks report.
For Rath, that’s all worth it.
“That’s a bargain to get $25 trillion of natural resources out from underneath the control of Ottawa,” he said. “An Alberta economy completely unshackled from Ottawa regulation and taxation? We could go to New York and have the money in less than 10 minutes.”
Rath says Alberta would have no shortage of people willing to supply the money.
“Why do you think we’re going down and meeting with the Americans in Washington D.C.?” said Rath.
