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Policy Misalignment
Policy misalignment is when a program's stated mandate has drifted from where it actually spends. Alberta publishes the spending side in detail; the mandate side is not yet in the open-data record.
- What this page shows now
- Nothing live on this page yet. The spending-side backbone — ministry × line-item × fiscal year, plus recipient-profile rollups — is ready and used by neighbouring chapters; this chapter waits on the mandate-text corpus.
- What is missing to prove more
- Ministry business plans, annual reports, and budget speeches are PDFs on open.alberta.ca/publications, not datasets on open.alberta.ca/opendata.
- Why it matters
- Without the mandate side, the public record can show what was spent but not whether it matches what was promised. This is one of the cleanest 'open data exists, just not in the right shape' gaps in the Alberta record.
I
The Alberta record
What Alberta’s open data already shows, and what we’d need to prove more
What the open record already shows
- · budget_estimate_lines (ministry × line-item × FY), budget_fiscal_plan_lines.
- · ministry_fiscal_year_spending + recipient/vendor rollups (actuals with drill-down).
- · ministry_budget_vs_disclosure — planned vs actual gap.
- · education_funding_rollup (spec 044) — recipient profile by school type/program.
- · Historical estimates PDFs in flight (spec 017, ~2004+).
- · cpi_alberta_monthly for inflation adjustment.
What we’d need to prove more
- · Mandate-text corpus: business plans, annual reports, budget speeches.
- · Text→program linkage via NLP.
- · Program-code crosswalk across renumberings.
II
Datasets we’d need (full inventory)
11 datasets that bear on this chapter — name, jurisdiction, and what's currently public
| Dataset | Jurisdiction | Publicly available? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| budget_estimate_lines | AB | Published | ingested |
| budget_fiscal_plan_lines | AB | Published | ingested |
| Historical estimates PDFs (pre-2019) | AB | Partial | PDF on open.alberta.ca (spec 017 in flight) |
| Ministry business plans | AB | Partial | PDF on open.alberta.ca, not ingested |
| Ministry annual reports | AB | Partial | PDF, not ingested |
| CPI Alberta monthly | AB | Published | StatsCan — ingested |
| GC InfoBase Departmental Plans + Results | Fed | Partial | CSV, 2018–present only |
| Departmental Results Reports | Fed | Partial | HTML/PDF per department |
| Program evaluations (5-year cycle) | Fed | Partial | PDF per department, backlog common |
| Mandate letters | Fed | Published | HTML |
| Mandate-text ↔ allocation crosswalk | Fed/AB | Not published | Would require NLP construction |
III
What open data still can’t answer
3 datasets or linkages this chapter still needs to close the question — most are blocked at the source, not the analysis.
- Mandate-text corpus: business plans, annual reports, budget speeches.
- Text→program linkage via NLP.
- Program-code crosswalk across renumberings.
See chapter 11 · the data-gaps matrix for the full inventory.