Alberta Premier Danielle Smith yesterday announced a raft of referendum questions for Oct. 19 demanding provincial intrusion into federal jurisdiction, cutting services to new Canadians and other anti-immigrant measures, and seeking significant changes to the Canadian constitution.
There will be five wordy policy referenda focusing on immigration and clearly designed to appeal the United Conservative Party’s base, but worded to sound reasonable at an inattentive glance. There will be four additional questions asking voters to approve an effort to negotiate major constitutional changes.
Needless to say, once it gets a border or two away from Wild Rose Country’s well-trained voters, all this is likely to float about as well as the proverbial lead balloon.
But if nothing changes in the way the federation is structured, that will be just fine with Ms. Smith and her political brain trust. This is because the plan described in her 13-minute televised message last night at suppertime is clearly designed to succeed at the first step, passage by a majority of however many Albertans bother to vote, and thereafter to get bogged down in opposition from other provinces and the complexities of the Canadian Constitution’s amending formula. This will advance the United Conservative Party’s separatist agenda.
In the meantime, with her finger-pointing about how falling oil prices and Liberal politicians are responsible for rising costs and tighter spending in Alberta, her televised chat yesterday evening was also an opportunity to lower expectations for next Thursday’s provincial budget.
As retired Mount Royal University political science professor Keith Brownsey observed yesterday after the video had been aired, “what we have here is a premier blaming immigrants for her government’s failures to maintain health care, education and other social services. What she forgot to mention is that most ‘immigrants’ to Alberta come from other parts of Canada.”
“I can guarantee that there will be no constitutional changes,” Dr. Brownsey added. “She seems to be setting the province up for a vote on independence.”
Ms. Smith acknowledged that all the referenda ideas came out of her government’s directed and supporter-packed “Alberta Next” policy snake-oil road shows, but framed that as if it were a good thing.
Throughout the fire-free fireside, she blamed most of the province’s problems on lower-than-expected oil prices, immigrants, and Justin Trudeau, not necessarily in that order. The focus on immigration was widely expected, in part thanks to a couple of her advisors’ intemperate social media posts in the previous few hours.
Ms. Smith pointed to Trudeau Era immigration policies as the cause of the province’s shortage of classroom space for the children of new Albertans. Never mind her UCP government’s failure to plan for growth everyone knew for years was coming, or to fund it.
And while she barely mentioned the lack of capacity in Alberta’s hospitals that has seen them descend into chaos in recent months, that glossed over the fact it’s been more than 40 years since a new hospital was built in Edmonton while the population of Alberta’s capital city has more than doubled. It would have been hard to deny that Mr. Trudeau was prime minister for less than a quarter of that time.
Naturally, Ms. Smith also made no mention of the multi-millions of dollars her government has hosed away on ideological projects and political mischief to own the Libs in Ottawa, like that $70 million for almost unusable children’s “Tylenot” purchased during a short-lived national shortage of acetaminophen in 2022. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that that Alberta has just spent another $718,000 to destroy what was left.
Nor did Ms. Smith say anything about her call less than two years ago for Alberta’s population to double to 10 million people – the better to throw our weight around in Confederation. Or the UCP’s successful advertising campaigns calling on Ontario and B.C. residents to move here. This caught the attention of her own party’s highly influential MAGA base and by the summer of 2024 she had jumped onto the anti-immigration bandwagon.
So her dream of Red Deer, a city of 100,000 souls best known as a coffee and gas stop halfway between the fleshpots of Calgary and Edmonton, hitting a population of a million any time soon will have to be put back on ice for a long spell.
“Alberta taxpayers can no longer be asked to continue to subsidize the entire country through equalization and federal transfers, permit the federal government to flood our borders with new arrivals and then give free access to our most-generous-in-the-country social programs to anyone who moves here,” Ms. Smith complained, exploiting her government’s carefully nurtured popular misunderstanding of how federal transfer payments work.
Turns out the population growth she was demanding so recently is “financially crippling and undercuts the quality of our health care, education and other social services.” You know, like public health care, which her government is striving to dismantle.
Hilariously, the premier assured listeners that despite low oil prices and the cost of all those immigrants, “the approved wage increases for our doctors, nurses and teachers will remain in place so we can continue to attract the skilled professionals needed to catch up with our growth.”
Nice to know. I wonder who informed her that, unlike the United States she so admires, even governments in this country have to abide by legal contracts and the rule of law? Can you imagine what would have happened if the UCP had tried to roll back just-negotiated wages with skilled health-care professionals? It wouldn’t have been pretty.
So here are Ms. Smith’s planned referenda questions, in her own words:
- Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purpose of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and ensuring Albertans have first priority to new employment opportunities?
- Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially funded programs such as health, education and other social services?
- Assuming that all citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs, as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to be resident in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially funded social support programs?
- Assuming that all citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their families use of the health care and education systems?
- Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or citizenship card, to be eligible to vote in a provincial election to strengthen Alberta’s constitutional and fiscal position within a united Canada.
Needless to say, much of this makes little sense upon examination. It is mostly bad policy that would not save money and in some cases would violate the constitution we have now. In addition, it would be mean-spirited and often cruel. The final point is a solution in search of a problem, although one that is fiercely believed in by MAGA fantasists.
In addition, the government will seek approval to work with “other willing provinces” to amend the Canadian Constitution in four ways, Ms. Smith said. It is not completely clear if this is supposed to be one referendum question with four bullets or four referenda.
- Have provincial governments and not the federal government select the justices appointed to provincial Kings Bench and appeals courts?
- Abolish the unelected federal Senate.
- Allow provinces to opt out of federal programs intruding on provincial jurisdictions such as health, education and social services without losing any of the associated federal funding for use in their own provincial social programs.
- Better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared constitutional areas of jurisdiction priority over federal laws when in conflict with one another.
All these ideas are likely to be immediately rejected by other provinces. Which, as previously noted, is probably the point.
The NDP Opposition, foolishly, decided to wait until this this morning after the news cycle has moved on to respond. That fits with Leader Naheed Nenshi’s wish to do politics in full sentences. It doesn’t show much understanding of how political discourse is carried on in this era, though. The UCP, I am sure, was delighted.