Lennie Kaplan is a former senior manager in the Fiscal and Economic Policy Division of Alberta’s Ministry of Treasury Board and Finance (TB&F). During his tenure, he focused, among his other duties, on assisting in the development of meaningful options to reform federal-provincial fiscal arrangements. In 2019, he served as executive director to the MacKinnon Panel on Alberta’s Finances.The Smith government’s decision to hold off on doing any significant internal analysis of the economic and fiscal impacts of Alberta independence prior to June 2 constitutes a major failure of risk management and contingency planning in government.This is a key finding that I have arrived at after reviewing the limited disclosure of some independence records, obtained from Alberta Treasury Board and Finance (TB&F) under the Access to Information Act (ATI), regarding internal work conducted by the Alberta government on the risks of Alberta independence to the provincial economy and the province’s finances. For over one year, since the release of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), Value of Freedom independence document in July 2025, I have been asking the Alberta government to provide Albertans with records of the internal work that it has conducted evaluating the impacts of Alberta independence. Despite extensive public policy discourse among Albertans about the feasibility of Alberta independence, I was told repeatedly by the Alberta government that no such records existed. Now, the latest request for records from TB&F reveals that the Smith government only “sprang into” action in terms of its internal analytical work on June 2, coincidentally the day after Premier Smith estimated the costs of independence to the Alberta government to be $400 billion, including $170 billion in legacy federal debt allocation. Until June 2, it does not appear that any appreciable internal work had been conducted by the Alberta government evaluating the economic and fiscal impacts of Alberta independence. In my opinion, this constitutes a major failure of the Alberta government’s risk management and contingency planning systems to respond adequately to a critical issue that had been in the public policy domain for nearly one year..TB&F’s disclosure of independence records, under ATI, gives some perspective on what was occurring within the Department at the time. It shows that, on June 2, the Department finally began to assess the impact of independence as it related to the allocation to the Province of Alberta of its share of federal legacy debt. A June 2 TB&F email states, “Do we have an accurate calculation of what Alberta's share of the national debt is and if yes, what the annual interest is and what that cost per Albertan would be? Context: this is to support minister in an interview! Premier made this statement in a response yesterday in a scrum about the cost of independence report: Alberta’s share of the national debt is approx. $170 billion and would cost about $10 billion/yr in interest costs. And minister has an interview today about the report on costs of independence, so we want to make sure he’s using the most accurate data, if available, and also to give the Premier’s Office (PO) those accurate numbers.” Two officials in TB&F noted in response to this request: “This is not an easy question that can be reasonably answered in an hour or two … I’ve let Minister’s Office (MO) (know) this question is more complex.”Since June 1, I have been asking the Alberta government where Premier Smith came up with her estimate of the cost of independence of $400 billion, including $170 billion in legacy federal debt that would be assumed by Alberta. I was told, repeatedly, that no such records existed. Now we find that TB&F started seriously working on this issue only on June 2, a day after the Premier’s public statements. And still, TB&F won’t produce any of the actual records of the results of its internal analysis on what it considers to be Alberta’s share of the federal legacy debt and the debt-servicing costs of that debt. A TB&F email states that “…here is the response we were developing in relation to this request. We were waiting on Treasury and Risk Management’s (TRM’s) response to some of our questions about where the interest rate could go…” The mystery of how the Alberta government came up with the $400 billion figure continues to this day. If the Premier didn’t get the $400 billion, the $170 billion, and the $10 billion numbers from TB&F or Executive Council, then where did they come from?Also, from the recent records disclosure from TB&F, it appears that the Alberta government did not seriously consider conducting a comprehensive review of the economic and fiscal impacts of Alberta independence until June 2. This is despite the fact that I have been calling for just such a review since November 2025. According to a June 2, 2026, internal TB&F email, “…we’ve also now separately been asked by Deputy Minister’s Office (DMO) to pull together a list of high-level items we would need to consider for costing Alberta independence generally. Other areas of TBF have also been asked to put together such a list, to be provided to DMO. Understanding it’s a very tall order, would it be possible to get something to me in the next hour?” .I believe that there is a lot of government politics at work here, and that is to the detriment of Albertans who have been seeking a comprehensive and objective risk assessment of the costs of independence. It appears to me that the Smith government gave the Alberta Prosperity Project, the Alberta Transition Council, and significant elements within the UCP membership as much runway as possible to state their fiscal and economic case for Alberta independence without any objective scrutiny by government. The Alberta government gave the independence movement a lower threshold of petition signatures to clear; it gave the movement the tenth question on the October 19 referendum ballot; and it then prepared the terms of reference for the independent analysis of Alberta independence by the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy (SPP) in relative secrecy, refusing numerous requests to release the detailed terms of reference and choosing to release them only belatedly after I filed an ATI request. What more could the Smith government have done to bolster the prospects for the independence movement in Alberta?From the latest ATI disclosure, I am sadly left to conclude that the Smith government, for political reasons I presume, was never predisposed to allow officials within TB&F and Executive Council to do the necessary analytical work around Alberta independence to support risk management and contingency planning activities within government until it was “late in the game.” This process should logically have started in the summer of 2025, not in a rushed and compressed manner on June 2, 2026. This constitutes a clear failure of risk management and contingency planning processes within the Alberta government, and it is all Albertans who are suffering the consequences. Lennie Kaplan is a former senior manager in the Fiscal and Economic Policy Division of Alberta’s Ministry of Treasury Board and Finance (TB&F). During his tenure, he focused, among his other duties, on assisting in the development of meaningful options to reform federal-provincial fiscal arrangements. In 2019, he served as executive director to the MacKinnon Panel on Alberta’s Finances.
