Recent Changes to Provincial Government Budget Reporting in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Defining a government by its finances is a tricky business. Adding to the complexity, governments can change the way they report those finances. This is the case in Alberta where, beginning under former premier Jim Prentice, the government switched from presenting its budgets from a fiscal plan (FP) basis to a consolidated financial (CF) basis. The FP approach did not include most of the financial implications of accounting for the Crown-controlled SUCH sector (school boards, universities and colleges, and health entities). CF-based budgeting now integrates these. The result is that the government now reports revenues and expenditures as being considerably larger than they were previously. This communiqué comes to grips with the changes to accounting methods, by adjusting Alberta’s recent budgets, now reported on a CF basis, and makes those methods consistent with the FP accounting approach, used by governments in Alberta prior to 2015. This involves disentangling entity budgets, reallocating property tax shares, evaluating federal government transfers, and more. The resulting calculations make it possible to more accurately compare and contrast recent budgetary choices with those made over the past four decades. The accounting changes also have implications for the apparent size of the annual deficit. For example, the provincial government deficit in 2016-2017 is reported as being nearly $1 billion less than is calculated to have been the case had the previous accounting approach been retained.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".