Alberta’s October referendum could cost taxpayers up to $130M: expert

A former Alberta chief electoral officer estimates the October referendum will run a $130-million price tag due to several ballot questions.

A former chief electoral officer with Elections Alberta estimates the province’s October referendum could cost taxpayers as much as $130 million.

Lorne Gibson, who has also worked on elections in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, says his calculations show price tags “well into” nine figures.

That’s a substantial increase from Alberta’s 2023 general election, which cost about $37 million.

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“It’s a lot bigger in scale,” he told CTV News. “And four or five months (of planning) is a very short timeframe for all of this.”

October’s vote will consist of 10 different questions on 45 million total ballots.

By comparison, 1.7 million ballots were cast in Alberta’s 2023 provincial general election, and 19.8 million ballots were cast in Canada’s 2025 federal general election.

In addition, Elections Alberta has already launched a recruitment drive to hire about 60,000 staff members to execute October’s referendum — a task that includes counting all ballots within a 48-hour deadline.

That’s compared to just 13,095 workers for the last provincial election.

Current Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure has called the recruitment alone a “colossal undertaking.”

“We want four-and-a-half times the number of staff of the last general election,” Gibson said. “Labour costs represent roughly 50 per cent of the full cost of these kinds of events, and you’ve got to add in some inflation.”

“Ballot printing is going to cost 10 times as much as it did in the last general election, and the offices and voting place rentals are going to be more expensive.”

Elections Alberta tells CTV News it won’t have an official budget ready until the fall.

Even then, the province won’t necessarily approve any request.

The independent body says right now it has the lowest cost-per-capita electoral services in the country. That’s helped along by a Canada-best staff-per-elector ratio.

The province wouldn’t grant CTV News’ interview request.

Instead, the press secretary for the Alberta Ministry of Justice sent a statement saying “requests for funding are made to the Standing Committee on Legislative Offices. The committee will wait to hear from Chief Electoral Officer, Gordon McClure, regarding costs for the referendum.”