EDMONTON — Citing the need for fiscal discipline in uncertain times, the Government of Alberta announced this week that it has carefully reviewed its commitments to Indigenous language revitalization and determined there is simply no money for it, a conclusion reached in the same budget cycle that found $40 million for an advertising campaign about how affordable the province is.

"We take our obligations very seriously," said a Treasury Board spokesperson, reading from a binder that did not appear to contain the obligations. "But you have to understand, revitalizing a language is a long-term investment with no clear return. We're a results-driven province. We need to see the numbers."

Officials clarified that the languages would be eligible for funding the moment they could demonstrate quarterly growth, a metric notably never applied to the legislature's own gift shop. When reminded that the languages in question encode millennia of place-based ecological and relational knowledge — much of it about the very land the province is currently trying to monetize — the spokesperson nodded thoughtfully and asked whether that knowledge could be licensed.

The province was careful to note that the shortfall was nobody's fault. A century of residential schools, funded and mandated by the same levels of government now pleading poverty, was described in the briefing as "a legacy issue" and "frankly, before our time," despite the policy of devitalization being, by every available measure, extremely on time.

"What people forget is that a promise is technically a non-binding expression of intent," added a senior advisor, who requested anonymity because the promise had been made on camera. "We never said when. We're keeping our word. The word is just taking a while."

At press time, the government had announced a new committee to study the feasibility of one day forming a working group to explore the possibility of revisiting the file, a process it described as "moving fast." The committee will report its findings in a language the languages' speakers were not permitted to keep.