Alberta is two and a half years removed from hearing Premier Danielle Smith declare her government looked forward optimistically to doubling the province’s population to 10 million people by 2050.
She also spent part of 2024 repeatedly musing that Red Deer, with its 106,000 residents, ought to swell to one million.
But that was then. Times have changed.
Certainly, the public mood toward immigration has changed, all over Canada, as a recent surge in newcomers (though not quite as aggressive as Smith had fancied) strained housing and some public services.
Alberta’s budget picture has changed, too — lower than expected oil prices jerking the province from an $8.3 billion surplus in Smith’s more-bullish-on-immigration days to a big deficit this year, and another bath of red ink the premier has forewarned will come in next Thursday’s budget.
She drew a straight bold line between rising immigration rates and her province’s fiscal woes in her televised speech Thursday: “Throwing the doors 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.”
She’s proposed solutions to this problem she’s cited: trying to restrict newcomers, and the services they received. But rather than act on them immediately, she’ll ask Albertans to ratify her ideas or reject them in referendums this fall.
Smith has now scheduled for Oct. 19 five different ballot questions on immigration — and four more about various constitutional reforms that preoccupied her Alberta Next panels, including on Senate abolition and the province seizing judge-selection duties from Ottawa.
Nine in total, potentially to be joined by a 10th.
That’s the One Question to Rule Them All: whether Alberta should separate from Canada. (This happens if the independence movement succeeds with its ongoing petition drive.)
Those nine or 10 questions amount to more direct democracy than Alberta has ever reckoned with. Not just in one year — in all 120 years of this province’s existence, there have been eight province-wide referendums (including three in the early days about prohibition, three on daylight saving time, one on electrification and 2021’s question on equalization).
How will all these questions interact, the ones that appeal to Albertans’ abiding interests in immigration and Senate reform with a deeply existential question on Alberta’s future in Canada, which public opinion appears to be sharply against?
One might need a panel of political scientists plus a few psychology professors to determine that.
Plus, there will be eight months of public discussion and debate to come on this assortment of questions, a period that might require Alberta voters to become constitutional scholars and federalism experts to understand the ins and outs and options presented here.
But what seems clear is the provocative focus that Smith has now placed on non-permanent newcomers — specifically international students, temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers — and what they deserve or don’t deserve to receive.
“This is what we’re talking about — making sure the services are prioritized to the people who’ve registered a permanent stake in our country and our province,” she told reporters Friday.
“That’s Canadian citizens and permanent residents. And temporary individuals should be treated as that — temporary, and tourists.”
She’s casting it in pure economic terms, but there is a long tradition of expansive debates about immigration becoming more loaded and volatile.
One need not look only to the United States and some European countries for how the discourse gets cultural — some has also shown up in Alberta, including the social media feed of senior Smith aide Bruce McAllister this week.
“Why import from nations with failed systems when our Judeo-Christian heritage and principles have worked so well here?” he wrote, prompting Smith to defend both her Calgary director and Alberta’s diverse mix of diaspora communities.
The NDP call it all scapegoating.
“The level of racism and hate that has been expressed has risen, undoubtedly, and it is aligned with this premier’s attempt to pin all of her failings on newcomers to this province,” the Opposition’s deputy leader Rakhi Pancholi said Friday.
Smith took umbrage with those who labelled her plan to charge non-permanent residents a special fee for services as a “head tax.”
“Is that what you would characterize Ontario’s charging of a health-care premium to non-permanent residents?” she fired back in a news conference. “You’d call that a head tax?”
(All Ontarians making above $20,000 pay health-care premiums, not unlike Albertans were once charged.)
Smith is, however, correct that other provinces have less generous policies or phase-in periods for non-permanent residents and their families, although none have done so by getting all voters to weigh in on those specific proposals.
If the government intends to touch off an eight-month debate on the facts, it would perhaps be wise to set some baseline numbers now.
According to the latest Statistics Canada population estimate, about 281,000 people in Alberta were non-permanent residents as of October. In what’s now a five-million person province, that’s around 5.5 per cent of the population, which is below the national average.
Alberta’s non-permanent population actually began to fall last year, down 15,000 from the start of 2025.
Amid what seemed like a growing consensus that immigration was unsustainable during the pandemic and in years following, the federal government had stepped in to curb streams of temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum seekers.
It’s gotten to the point where more non-permanent migrants moved out of Alberta than arrived, indicating that the curve has already been bending before any provincial interventions or referendums.
Temporary foreign workers pay income taxes to fund services, as do some visiting students with work visas and non-permanent refugees (like the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled the Russian invasion).
However, even as the taxpaying population grows and the economy expands too, Alberta’s deficits don’t seem to be abating.
That suggests that Alberta’s fiscal and revenue structure could have much to do with the shortfall. But how would one shape a referendum around that?
