Methodology¶
Here is how the numbers in this repo were built, what confidence each one carries, and what is deliberately not here. The project is built to survive a hostile reader, which means being louder about uncertainty than an advocacy piece usually is. Everything draws from one verified spine, the canonical dataset compiled 2026-07-03. Every figure on the site traces back to it, and it in turn traces to a filed clipping under sources.
The two anchors¶
EPS has no single budget number, so the repo carries two and labels which is in play everywhere. Net operating ($467M in 2024, $475M approved 2026) is the tax-supported figure council votes and taxpayers fund. It is the primary anchor because it is the smaller, more recognizable, harder-to-attack number. Gross operating ($560.05M budgeted 2024, $563.87M actual) is total spend, grant-funded and cost-recovered dollars included. Because SIPRI reports military expenditure gross, the true apples-to-apples comparison would pit EPS gross against foreign gross. Leading with the smaller net figure errs conservative on purpose, and the repo says so wherever the contrast appears instead of quietly reaching for whichever number flatters the argument.
Currency conversion¶
All foreign military figures convert from USD to CAD at a flat 1.37. That is conservative. The 2026 spot rate was nearer 1.42, and a higher rate would make every foreign military look larger in CAD and so shrink the EPS multiple. At 1.37 the multiples come out smaller than a spot-rate conversion would give. The comparison is built to understate.
Confidence levels¶
Every figure in the dataset carries a confidence label, and the site keeps them rather than laundering estimates into apparent facts.
| Level | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| HIGH | Primary source or hard reporting; auditable | 2024 provincial grants of $50.4M (Commission variance report) |
| MED | Reconstructed from multiple partial sources | Surveillance/tech capital floor of ~$42–48M |
| LOW | Estimated or back-cast; labelled as such | 2015–2018 budget back-casts; Barbados defence figure |
Where a figure is a floor rather than a point estimate, most importantly the surveillance-capital layer and the black-box total, the site says "floor" and gives a range. The black-box total is never rendered as one false-precise number.
How the budget back-cast was built¶
The 2019–2026 budget figures are source-backed from council decisions, City resource analyses, and Edmonton Police Commission variance reports. The 2015–2018 figures are back-cast estimates. No clean published net figure exists for those years, so they run backward at roughly 5%/yr from the documented $356.3M in 2019. They carry LOW confidence and sketch the growth trend, nothing to quote as fact.
What is NOT found — and why that's on the record¶
A reconstruction is only as honest as the negatives it admits. A few things were searched for and recorded as absent or misattributed on purpose, because leaving them out would let a hostile reader "catch" the project repeating a common error.
Errors a hostile reader would check for
- Facial recognition is two separate episodes, not one: the Clearview AI incident (2019–20, three officers, self-signed-up, surfaced via a data breach) and the Axon body-cam proof-of-concept (2025, a formal pilot). The repo keeps them apart instead of welding them into one scarier story.
- Civil asset forfeiture does not meaningfully fund EPS. Alberta routes proceeds to community organizations, and the direct flow to EPS is about $0.
Other adversarial notes¶
A few smaller guardrails apply throughout. Iceland's zero military is a matter of policy, not poverty, so it gets a footnote and never a headline. Barbados carries the lowest-confidence military figure and never leads a claim. Sierra Leone's 9M population makes it a shock line about the sheer size of the budget, not a claim that EPS out-arms a comparable peer. The undisclosed surveillance gear, facial recognition and ALPR and IMSI catchers and the drone fleet, enters the black-box total at $0 rather than as a guess, which keeps the total a documented floor. And where EPS won't disclose a number, the repo records the non-disclosure itself as the finding rather than papering over the gap.
Sources¶
The full filed inventory, with citation, canonical URL, retrieval date, and type for every clipping, sits on the sources page. Each equipment page in the dossier links its own source clipping directly.