Want to boost Albertans' support for leaving CPP? Ask the question differently

It's apparent that a fourth Liberal victory has triggered a surge in anti-Ottawa sentiment in Alberta, but have things changed so much that a populace long opposed to pulling the province out of the Canada Pension Plan now supports it?

One reading of fresh polling commissioned by the Premier Danielle Smith's government argues as much. 

A Postmedia writer got his hands on a provincially funded survey by pollster Janet Brown's Trend Research, and used the results to argue that most Albertans — 55 per cent — now back an APP instead of a CPP.

The article compared that to only 23 per cent support in a Leger poll earlier this year, which is similar to multiple survey findings in 2024 and not much better than Brown herself tracked in 2022.

One more Liberal prime minister later, and now the province is ready to walk away from CPP?

Not so fast. This takes some squinting.

As happens so often, the answer may not be as important as the question used to obtain it.

"Different questions will give you different results," Brown said in an interview with CBC News, after publicly releasing the entire government-commissioned poll on her own website, for transparency's sake.

For the last several years, different pollsters have yielded similar results by asking roughly the same question of poll respondents: "Do you believe the Alberta government should create a new provincial pension plan to replace the Canada Pension Plan for Albertans?"

The survey the Smith government paid for put it differently. It asked about "replacing the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta Pension Plan that guaranteed all Alberta seniors the same or better benefits than the Canada Pension Plan." (italics ours)

The government's question added a perspective-shifting caveat to the simple yes-or-no question, offering a guarantee of no financial risk for pensioners — an assurance that could depend largely on how much of the total CPP pie Alberta would get as its starting pot, a figure that remains in dispute.

If supporting Alberta separatism came with guaranteeing zero economic hardship, perhaps more residents would say they support it, too.

Brown noted another unique feature of her survey, which other non-government polls haven't included: an option to say they'd vote for, against, or "would need more information."

To that unusually guarantee-caveated question, 22 per cent said they needed more information; 35 said they'd vote against, and 42 per cent were for the no-downside CPP exit. ( A person would have to strip out the information-hungry from the survey to report that a majority of Albertans back an APP.)