Alberta has provincial legislation allowing its municipalities to conduct municipal censuses between April 1 and June 30 inclusive. Due to the concurrency of Statistics Canada conducting the Canada 2016 Census in May 2016, the Government of Alberta offered municipalities the option to alter their 2016 municipal census timeframes to either March 1 through May 31 or May 1 through July 31. Municipalities choose to conduct their own censuses for multiple reasons such as to better inform municipal service planning and provision, to capitalize on per capita based grant funding from higher levels of government, or to simply update their populations since the last federal census.