Just a year after the Alberta government made a big splash unveiling its new border security team to the public with an announced $29-million investment, its latest budget shows the province only spent a third of the total it earmarked for the work over its first year.

Last year’s fiscal plan budgeted $15 million toward the Alberta Border Security Initiative to get the team off the ground. But the province’s new budget estimates it spent just $5 million.

The first year for the Interdiction Patrol Team (IPT) focused on deploying officers, while establishing patrols and operational capacity, said Sheena Campbell, a spokesperson for Alberta’s Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Services.

“As implementation progressed, some planned expenditures, including hiring to full complement and certain equipment and infrastructure costs, occurred later than originally forecast,” Campbell told CBC News via email. 

Under the command of the Alberta Sheriffs, the IPT was created to combat drug smuggling, gun trafficking and illegal border crossings. 

The team was announced in December 2024, shortly after then U.S. president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Canadian goods unless Canada stemmed what he claimed was a tide of illegal immigration and drugs flowing into his country.

Last year’s fiscal plan promised $25 million spent across two years on border security, to support buying equipment and developing facilities. The province still plans to invest the same amount, but now plans to spread it out over an additional year, including $9 million earmarked for the upcoming year and $11 million in 2027-28.

A government underspending its budget isn’t unusual, said Christian Leuprecht, a national security expert at the Royal Military College of Canada. Ramping up staff and equipment can take longer than expected, and he noted the province distributing its $25-million investment across an extra year reflects the steep learning curve that comes with border security.

But he added it could also show the province is finding that the role it can play in a space typically monitored by federal agencies is important but limited.

“So, government could have lost interest, or it could also be a reflection of it just not being as big a priority as initially everybody thought this was going to be,” said Leuprecht.

“Now we’re finding an equilibrium where everybody’s realizing that, yes there is a role that probably the province should have played much earlier with the border, but it’s a limited role.”

Campbell added the province ’s spending is also affected by some equipment, such as fleet vehicles, taking longer to arrive, and minor office renovations that are still underway with funding held until they’re completed.

Early last year, other provinces like Ontario and Saskatchewan similarly announced increased border security efforts.

Rotating sheriffs onto border team

Initially, Alberta announced the IPT would include 51 officers, as well as additional staff, patrol dogs and surveillance drones.

Over its first year, Campbell said the IPT used rotating deployments of sheriffs from other areas to manage vacancies. She said the province plans to continue this approach “as hiring progresses and funding aligns with the next stages of implementation.”

If the province could not reach its staffing goal in a short period, while pulling officers from other units that may themselves be under-staffed, Leuprecht said that could help explain why the province underspent its target.

But he added it also points to a sub-optimal approach to the border.

Effective border security, Leuprecht argued, requires understanding the people and goods typically crossing it, gathering intelligence far from the border itself, understanding transnational data flow, and co-ordinating with other federal and international agencies. That’s why the work is typically handled by dedicated agencies with a staff that has career-long expertise, he said.

“This is a relatively steep and complex effort, and I think politicians both federally and provincially underestimate the complexity of that effort,” said Leuprecht.

Redeployment possible

When the IPT was first announced, Premier Danielle Smith told CBC’s Power & Politics that part of the reason why it was investing in law enforcement at the border was “we don’t know what we don’t know.”

A year later, Smith said what the province has learned is that the border crossing at Coutts, the busiest crossing in Alberta, wasn’t a “huge traffic or transit route for either human smuggling or drug smuggling or trafficking, or even people sneaking across the border either way.”

Smith said that means the province has to focus on other things, and suggested she would be speaking to Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis about whether there’s a need to redeploy any of the team’s resources. She added she still believes boots on the ground at the border are worthwhile.

Ellis’s office confirmed in December the province would consider redeployment if intelligence shows its officers would be more effective elsewhere.