Stephen Carter (former chief of staff for Alison Redford) made the case in a CTV interview that the funds spent on the upcoming ten referendum questions in Alberta could be better spent on other things.

The argument Carter is making is familiar because it is cheap to produce and hard to argue against in a sound bite. List a large public number. Convert it into doctors, teachers, or schools. Call the expenditure “silly.”

This lazy campaign template doesn’t hold much water. You can run it against any public outlay which doesn’t appear to offer an immediate, tangible benefit.

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Why spend money on a general election, a census, a legislature, or any public inquiry when that money could have been spent on healthcare for sick children, or feeding the hungry or rescuing puppy dogs?

If that is enough to settle the question, then democracy itself is always too expensive, because democracy is a process, not a service delivery program. The 2023 provincial election cost about $37 million. Nobody serious argued Alberta should skip choosing a government and hire a few dozen doctors instead. The difference now is not the accounting. It is that Carter dislikes this particular vote.

Alberta’s operating budget is in the tens of billions. Health spending alone is in the mid-$30 billion range. Education is in the low teens of billions. Against that scale, $134 million is not a choice between “referendum or a functioning health system.” It is a one-time administrative cost equal to a rounding error in the annual books. If Alberta’s shortages of doctors and teachers were caused by the absence of $134 million, they would have been solved many budgets ago.
Democracy comes with a price. The principle cannot be that a vote is affordable only when the preferred side expects to win. If the public may only be consulted on matters that are cheap, uncontroversial, or already decided, then consultation is theatre.

Referenda can offer benefits that offset the cost of holding the exercise. If the vote produces clarity to remain, or proceed toward a binding decision, it can end years of political trench warfare that itself consumes legislative time, legal fees, advertising, and institutional attention. Ambiguity is not free. It just does not show up as a single invoice from Elections Alberta.

A case can be made that the vote could be held more efficiently to find savings, perhaps. But to measure the cost of the referendum against unrelated expenditures doesn’t invalidate the need to hold the referendum in the first place.