Danielle Smith keeps feeding the beast |
As the Trump administration continues its unconstitutional assault on immigrants and spirals ever-closer to full-blown fascism, Canada’s premiers have pulled together in order to face down the growing threat it poses. Well, most of them have. Not content with one national unity crisis, it seems, Danielle Smith has decided to provoke yet another one with a series of referendum questions, four of which will directly measure the amount of empathy Albertans are willing to extend to immigrants. If there’s a Pandora’s Box she hasn’t opened yet, it’s not for a lack of trying.
Thursday’s Premier’s address to the province featured the usual firehose of half-truths and exaggerations about oil and gas, and it very predictably blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — who, remember, hasn’t been in power for more than a year — for her province’s troubles. But there was something new in it as well: some very Trumpian language about “open-border immigration policies” and their supposed impact on Alberta. “Although sustainable immigration has always been an important part of our provincial growth model,” she said, “throwing the doors wide open to anyone and everyone across the globe has flooded our classrooms, emergency rooms, and social support systems with far too many people far too quickly.”
Rather than facing down the very real threat of Trumpism, her province will now spend the next eight months discussing all the ways that Canada and its immigration policies have wronged their province. On Oct. 19 Albertans will vote on nine referendum questions, four of which probe their willingness to deprive immigrants and temporary residents of access to social services, four others to measure their dissatisfaction with Canada, and one imports the same voter identification debate that the Trump administration is currently trying to force through Congress.
As bad as the questions around immigration and temporary residents are, the ones aimed at setting up a confrontation with other provinces might be worse. They ask voters whether they “support the government of Alberta proactively working with other willing provinces to amend the Canadian constitution.” The amendments in question are: abolishing the Senate, allowing provinces to choose justices for their superior courts, permitting provinces to drop out of federal programs dealing with health, education, and social services while still getting federal funding money for them, and giving the province supremacy over federal laws in areas where they are in conflict or share jurisdiction.
There are two ways this could go, neither of which would be good for the rest of the country. If provinces like Ontario, Quebec and BC stand in her way — and remember, constitutional amendments require the support of at least seven provincial legislatures representing at least 50 per cent of the population — she can blame them (and the federal government, of course) for once again frustrating Alberta’s ambitions. And if those provinces actually go along with some of these hare-brained ideas, we’d quickly find ourselves revisiting the turmoil of Meech Lake and Charlottetown.
There’s never a good time for that sort of constitutional conflict, but there might not be a worse one than right now. But as Smith has made clear time and time again, she doesn’t care about what’s best for Canada. Instead, she seems almost pathologically attuned to the needs of the separatists in her party, and has consistently bent over backwards to avoid attracting their ire. She will do almost anything, it seems, including jeopardizing the unity and integrity of the country, to avoid the same fate that befell Jason Kenney, who was ultimately undone by the more extreme elements in their party.
Those elements are clearly animated by the idea that immigration poses a threat to Alberta — or, at least, their preferred version of it. “We can no longer be asked 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,” Smith said.
Most of the premiers in Canada have banded together to face down the threat posed by Donald Trump. Except, that is, for Danielle Smith, who has decided to turn her province's attention to the threat posed by....Ottawa and its immigration policies?
She noted that Alberta’s population grew by almost 600,000 between 2019 and 2024, an increase of more than 10 per cent. What she didn’t note is that during Trudeau’s entire decade as prime minister Alberta’s population grew at an annualized rate of 1.93 per cent, a figure that is lower than the preceding (Harper-dominated) decade, when it grew at 2.21 per cent.
Smith also declined to discuss her government’s multi-year “Alberta is Calling” campaign to attract new people to the province, the second and third phases of which were conducted under her watch. She also neglected to mention the letter she sent to then-prime minister Trudeau in 2024 asking for more immigration, and specifically more temporary residents and workers.
I have little doubt that many Albertans will agree with her prescription here, even though the evidence — like this recent study from the libertarian Cato Institute — shows that immigration is a largely unalloyed good. Bringing facts to a mostly emotional conversation is like bringing a butter knife to a gun fight.
Smith is determined to serve up as much red meat as possible to the leopards who run her party (and, by extension, her province), and she’s laid out a formidable spread here. By distracting them with how much they dislike Ottawa, immigrants, and the provinces that won’t go along with her plans for Senate reform and provincial supremacy, Smith is hoping their appetite can finally be sated. She might want to consider the possibility that it will just make them hungrier in the end.