// methodology and sources

The numbers.

Every figure on AlbertaBitcoin.com comes from a primary source: Statistics Canada, Alberta Treasury Board and Finance audited reports, mainstream Canadian news outlets, and public price data from the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada. No estimates, no projections, no models. Just published data and arithmetic.

This is a thought experiment, not an investment plan. Nobody is saying Alberta should have bet the Heritage Fund on Bitcoin. The point is the size of the hole. We sent so much money out east that even a rounding error, the kind of allocation you would not bother putting in a press release, would be worth more today than the entire fund.

Net fiscal outflow

The headline number, Alberta\'s $231 billion net contribution to Canada over fifteen years, is built from data published by Statistics Canada. We do not adjust it, smooth it, or project it.

Definition: federal general government revenue collected from Alberta minus federal general government expenditure in Alberta, in current dollars, summed across calendar years 2010 through 2024.

Most recent year: 2024 is the latest year Statistics Canada has published for this table (released November 28, 2025). The figures here match that release exactly, every year from 2010 through 2024, with no adjustment.

2020 anomaly: COVID-19 emergency transfers created a net inflow of roughly $16.9 billion in 2020, the only year in the dataset where Ottawa spent more in Alberta than it collected. It is included as reported. The fifteen-year net is still $231 billion in Alberta\'s favour.

The live counter: Statistics Canada has not yet published 2025 or 2026 (the next annual release is expected in late 2026). So the homepage counter holds the most recent actual year, 2024, and carries its rate forward: $19.0 billion a year, which works out to roughly $602 a second. This is an assumption, not data. If 2025 comes in higher or lower, the counter is fast or slow by that much. We flag it here so the number is honest about what it is.

Heritage Fund AUM

Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund assets under management as of December 31, 2024: $31.9 billion (market value).

Source: audited annual reports from Alberta Treasury Board and Finance. Historical AUM values are taken from fiscal-year-end reports for each year 2010 through 2024. All figures are market value at fiscal year end.

Bitcoin allocation scenarios

The calculator offers ten scenarios. Each one is tied to a real institutional or sovereign Bitcoin moment, and each simulates an allocation against the historical net fiscal outflow. Six are dollar-cost-averaging scenarios that buy monthly; four are one-time purchases sized at 1 percent of Heritage Fund AUM at the time ($217 million).

Monthly DCA scenarios

• Bitcoin Brains (Jun 2013, 0.05%): 0.05 percent of each year\'s net outflow, divided by twelve, bought monthly at that month\'s historical BTC/CAD price. Starts the month Calgary\'s first Bitcoin store opened, before any government on earth held Bitcoin.
• CBOE Futures (Dec 2017, 0.5%): the month the Chicago Board Options Exchange launched the first regulated Bitcoin futures.
• Singapore (Jan 2018, 0.5%): the period Temasek began acquiring Bitcoin directly.
• Bhutan (Apr 2019, 0.5%): the period the Kingdom of Bhutan began mining and accumulating Bitcoin.
• El Salvador (Sep 2021, 2.2%): the month El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender.
• Norway (Jan 2020, 0.5%): when Norway\'s sovereign wealth fund began taking indirect Bitcoin exposure through equities.

One-time purchase scenarios

• MicroStrategy (Aug 2020), $250M: the month the first public company adopted Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve.
• Square (Oct 2020), $50M: the month Square allocated 1 percent of assets to Bitcoin.
• MassMutual (Dec 2020), $100M: the month the insurer added Bitcoin to its general account.
• Tesla (Feb 2021), $1.5B: the month Tesla announced its $1.5 billion purchase.

No compounding, no fees, and no slippage are modeled. Historical BTC/CAD prices are monthly closing values.

BTC/CAD price data

Historical price (the scenario math): the Bitcoin price in U.S. dollars is the Coinbase BTC/USD daily close published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED series CBBTCUSD), reduced to a monthly value. It is converted to Canadian dollars using the Bank of Canada\'s daily USD/CAD exchange rate (series FXUSDCAD). Two sourced public references, not one opaque feed.

Coverage limit: the Bank of Canada\'s daily USD/CAD series does not extend before 2017. For months before January 2017, the calculator uses vetted early-exchange BTC/CAD values carried forward from prior data. Treat the earliest years as illustrative rather than precise.

Live price (the "value today" figures): a real-time quote from Kraken (XBT/CAD), with blockchain.info as a fallback if Kraken does not respond. This drives the current-value numbers on each spending card.

Tax-relief benchmarks

The "or skipped these taxes" lines on each spending card use Alberta provincial revenue figures from the 2024-25 fiscal plan and population from Statistics Canada:

• Personal income tax revenue: $15.6 billion (2024 forecast)
• Corporate income tax revenue: $7.3 billion (2024 forecast)
• Provincial fuel tax revenue: $1.5 billion
• Education property tax revenue: $2.7 billion
• Heritage Fund AUM: $31.9 billion
• Alberta population: 4.85 million

Bitcoin Budget: government spending decisions

Each card in the Bitcoin Budget section is a specific, documented government spending decision drawn from municipal, provincial, and federal examples. Every card links to its primary news source, and its Bitcoin equivalent is computed using the historical BTC/CAD price for the month of the decision.

Primary sources

Fiscal data

• Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0450-01: revenue, expenditure and budgetary balance, general governments, provincial and territorial economic accounts.Annual data 1981 to present. Federal revenue and expenditure rows by province.
• Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund: annual reports and AUM history.Treasury Board and Finance, Government of Alberta.
• Alberta revenue overview: provincial tax revenue by category.Source for the tax-relief benchmark calculations.
• Budget 2024 Fiscal Plan 2024-27 (PDF): personal income tax, corporate tax, and other revenue line items.

Spending decisions

• CBC: Peace Bridge placed over Bow River$24.5M Calgary pedestrian bridge by Santiago Calatrava.
• CBC: Mayor calls $470K blue ring billed as public art "awful""Travelling Light", the big blue ring on the 96 Ave NE bridge.
• CBC: Premier Alison Redford repays $45K cost of South Africa tripMandela memorial trip on the government jet.
• CBC: Alberta\'s energy war room launches in CalgaryCanadian Energy Centre, initial $30M annual budget.
• CBC: Kenney on crude-by-rail contractsRoughly $1.5B cost to exit the crude-by-rail deal.
• CBC: Keystone XL is dead, and Albertans are on the hook for $1.3BFinal cost of the cancelled pipeline equity stake.
• CBC: Did Edmonton\'s Rogers Place deliver?City of Edmonton public contribution: $312M.
• CBC: Edmonton bike lane capital budget$100M, 2023-26 capital budget bike lane allocation.
• CBC: Auditor General report on ArriveCAN$59.5M federal app cost.
• Globe and Mail: Phoenix pay system$4.2B federal payroll system.
• CBC: Trans Mountain cost overruns$34B federal pipeline acquisition and build.
• CBC: WE Charity student grants$912M federal grant program.
• CBC: Ottawa abolishes Sustainable Development Technology Canada$59M flagged in the "green slush fund" review.
• CBC: McKinsey federal contracts$209M in federal consulting contracts.
• Globe and Mail: Economic Action Plan ads$750M federal advertising campaign.
• Yahoo News: Canada pledges $200M space port$200M federal commitment.

Bitcoin price

• FRED CBBTCUSD: Coinbase BTC/USD daily close, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.Historical price source for the scenario math, 2017 onward.
• Bank of Canada FXUSDCAD: daily USD/CAD exchange rate.Used to convert BTC/USD to BTC/CAD.
• Kraken XBT/CAD ticker: live BTC/CAD spot price.Primary live price source. Public REST API, no auth required.
• Blockchain.info ticker: BTC/CAD live price.Fallback if the Kraken request fails.

Population

• Statistics Canada Table 17-10-0009-01: population estimates, quarterly.Alberta population 4.85M, Q3 2024.

What this doesn't account for

The scenario math buys at the monthly closing price, holds, and marks to today. Real life is messier, and a fair reading should know where the edges are.

A buyer the size of a sovereign fund moves the market. You do not accumulate billions at the screen price; you pay a premium and bleed some to slippage. Holding has a cost too. The Heritage Fund runs an expense ratio in the range of three quarters of a percent a year, and fifteen years of that adds up. And the headline figure is paper. The moment you sell Bitcoin to actually build the hospital, you have a disposition to deal with, and converting a volatile asset to spendable dollars is never free or instant.

None of that is modelled here, on purpose. Pricing slippage, custody drag, and disposition treatment to the dollar would be false precision on a what-if. The point was never a forecast. It was the size of the gap. Even if you haircut hard for every cost above, the arithmetic still lands in the same place: we sent enough east that a rounding error would have changed the picture.