'I trust the judgment of Albertans': Smith to hold referendum on immigration, amending Canada's Constitution
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is proposing a raft of new policies aimed at reigning in high immigration rates, part of what she called a response to “disastrous” Trudeau-era immigration changes that have swamped the province’s public service.
In a live televised address to Albertans on Thursday evening, Smith said her government would put forward five referendum questions on Oct. 19, including one that would potentially curb immigrants’ access to some public services as a way to cut spending.
Smith’s proposal comes as Alberta has experienced rapid immigration growth in recent years which, according to the premier, has overwhelmed the province’s education and health-care systems. The province’s population has grown by more than 600,000 people in the last five years alone, she said, accounting for the sharpest annual growth rates since the 1980s, according to public data.
Calgary’s population alone grew by a staggering six per cent in 2023, or by 96,000 people, while Edmonton grew 4.2 per cent that same year.
Canada’s immigration system has long been a boon to the Alberta economy, but “disastrous open border immigration policies” under the previous prime minister have pushed the province into disarray, Smith said.
“Although sustainable immigration has always been an important part of our growth model, throwing the doors open to anyone and everyone across the globe has flooded our classrooms, emergency rooms and public support systems with far too many people far too quickly.”
At the root of Canada’s immigration woes, Smith said, is Ottawa’s sharp departure during the Trudeau years that moved the system away from its previous focus on attracting skilled workers and instead sought to recruit record-high numbers of temporary workers, foreign students and asylum claimants.
Alberta’s foreign student population has grown by 80,000 in the last four years, she said, with more than 140,000 students in the province now studying English as their additional language.
“Is it any wonder that our teachers and students are struggling so much with classroom complexity and crowding?” Smith said.
While it is unclear whether Smith’s proposed referendum would pass legal challenge, Smith’s promise of a referendum later this year points to growing frustrations among Albertans over soaring immigration rates. The premier said immigration was among the biggest concerns raised by citizens during the Alberta Next Panel hearings, which sought to collect public viewpoints ahead of an expected independence referendum later this year.
“The changes we need to make to immigration are a significant departure from the status quo, and therefore, I am seeking a referendum mandate from Albertans to implement them,” Smith said. “I trust the judgment of Albertans.”
Among the five referendum questions on immigration that the premier presented (which are separate from the citizen-led proposed independence referendum), Albertans will be asked whether the province should have more power to influence who enters its borders, or to otherwise prioritize economic immigration. Another asks whether Alberta should limit access to health, education and other services for people who aren’t permanent residents, Canadian citizens, or people with people with approved immigration status. For those who are not eligible, the third referendum question proposes charging a fee to non-residents who use social support programs.
The premier’s address comes as her United Conservative Party government has warned about “significant” deficits to come in next week’s budget, partly as a result of growing spending under Smith.
Alberta’s education and health-care systems have been buckling under the strain of the province’s rapidly growing population. The UCP government last year was locked in a prolonged battle with the province’s teachers over a range of issues, chief among them was a sharp rise in class sizes that have placed heavy stress on educators. Class sizes in Alberta now average 25 students, according to a recent report, with some having as many as 60. Meanwhile, on Dec. 22, 44-year-old Albertan Prashant Sreekumar died while awaiting emergency services for nearly eight hours, which similarly brought the province’s health-care system under ever-growing criticism.
Smith said she was broadly supportive of immigration into the province, saying Canada’s system had for years been a “huge strength” to Alberta and other provinces.
“In the past, Canada’s responsible immigration policies — such as those under Prime Minister Stephen Harper — constrained international immigration to manageable levels in Alberta, so that our province could keep up with the growth of our economy and population. It also ensured that new immigrants primarily arrived here with highly valuable skills, a good job, and started contributing income taxes the moment they arrived.”
While international immigration rates have fed into Alberta’s higher population rates, in-migration from other provinces has also been at record highs in recent years. In the second quarter of 2022, 32,090 residents came to Alberta from other provinces, the province’s most ever.
Smith announced that the referendum will also include four questions about support for Alberta “working with other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution” in order to abolish the federal Senate and give more power to provincial governments to elect judges and opt out of federal programs.
Read the full text of Danielle Smith’s speech
Good evening my fellow Albertans.
With a new budget approaching and a shifting geopolitical landscape, I wanted to take some time to speak with you about how your provincial government plans to navigate these challenges while ensuring Alberta continues to prosper.
I’d like to start with the good news.
The Alberta economy is once again booming. We are leading the entire country in virtually every economic category from job growth to investment to GDP to wages.
The energy agreement — or MOU — signed with Ottawa last year has eliminated both the destructive oil and gas production cap and the net zero power regulations. These two victories alone have had an immediate supercharging effect on our economy.
In just the last few weeks, we have had tens of billions in new projects announced, including several new AI datacentres, the expansion of TMX and other pipelines headed west and south, and a final investment decision by Dow Chemicals on their multi-billion dollar plastics facility.
And that’s just the start. In the coming year, we expect tens of billions in data centre and power generation announcements, oil production facility expansions and approval from the federal government for a million barrel a day pipeline to our west coast bound for Asian markets.
These investments will create a massive number of new jobs for Albertans and will prime the pump – so to speak – for more investments in all sectors of the economy, from agriculture, to tech, to tourism, to aviation, and everything in between.
It’s an exciting time for our province.
However, we have a very serious growth and budget challenge that must be addressed.
In the year I became Premier, the price of oil averaged $90 a barrel U.S. These strong oil prices saw our budget enjoy royalty revenue of over $25 Billion dollars and a surplus of around $12 Billion dollars which we used to build up the Heritage Fund and pay down provincial debt.
Since that time, however, the price of oil has fallen by over $30 dollars a barrel to around $60 dollars. Each $1 dollar drop in the price of oil means roughly $750 million dollars less in oil royalties for the province. The result: what had been a $12 billion surplus in 2023 at $90 oil, has turned into a large budget deficit at $60 dollar oil.
This is not the first crash in oil prices our province has faced, nor will it be the last.
What is unique about the current oil price crash versus others in the past, is that our economy today is more diversified, resilient, and still growing despite the drop in oil price.
To put it bluntly, people across the country and around the world continue to want to move to our province in very large numbers to pursue job opportunities and prosperity.
In the past, Canada’s responsible immigration policies, such as those under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, constrained international immigration to manageable levels in Alberta, so that our province could keep up with the growth of our economy and population. It also ensured that new immigrants primarily arrived here with highly valuable skills, a good job, and started contributing income taxes the moment they arrived.
That is the story of the vast majority of our amazing new Canadians who arrived here during that time and are now citizens. These Albertans were and still are a huge strength to our economy and provincial culture.
And then came Justin Trudeau’s disastrous open border immigration policies, which have caused an unprecedented strain on our health care, education, and other social programs.
In just the last 5 years of Trudeau’s tenure, Alberta grew by almost 600,000 people to more than 5 million, all while Ottawa throttled our most important job creating industries and prioritized immigration away from economic migrants and instead focused on international students, temporary workers, and asylum seekers.
Adding 600,000 people in 5 years is like adding half of the city of Calgary or Edmonton in 5 years.
Although sustainable immigration has always been an important part of our provincial growth model, 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.
As just one example, our student population has skyrocketed by more than 80,000 students in just the last 4 years, and more than 140,000 students now having English as their additional language. Is it any wonder that our teachers and students are struggling so much with classroom complexity and crowding?
To sum up our budget challenge: low oil prices combined with an out of control federal immigration policies are together driving unsustainable budget deficits — not just here but across the country.
That’s the problem. So what’s the solution?
Today I want to share with you a three part strategy to address this budget challenge without resorting to deep and disruptive cuts to core social services.
The long term strategy was announced last year. Our Government has already initiated an investment plan to build the Alberta Heritage Fund to more than 250 billion dollars by 2050. We are already ahead of schedule. By reinvesting, rather than spending interest earned in the fund each year, and investing the bulk of large surpluses in years with high oil prices like we saw in 2023, our government has already doubled the Heritage Fund from roughly $16 billion in 2021 to almost $32 billion dollars today.
That’s how quickly you can move the dial — we just have to stick with it.
If future Alberta governments continue with this strategy through to 2050, the annual interest earned on the Heritage Fund each year will ensure we can weather any short term dip in oil and gas prices and non-renewable resource revenue. When we reach this goal, Alberta will be forever free from its over reliance on oil and gas revenues. We need to stay the course.
In addition to our long-term strategy, our government also has a medium term strategy to double Alberta’s oil and gas production and exports to over 8 million barrels a day by 2035. Doing so will allow us to secure higher resource revenues for our budget even when energy prices are lower like they are today. And when energy prices bump back up, our province will see large surpluses, which will help us to reach the $250 billion by 2050 Heritage Fund target that I just outlined.
That is why our government will continue to work diligently on implementing the energy agreement recently signed with Ottawa to build 1.3 million barrels per day of additional pipeline capacity to the west coast, while also working with our great Canadian pipeline companies to expand pipeline capacity headed south.
We will also continue the work on our agreement signed with Ontario to send hundreds of thousands of barrels of Alberta crude to their refineries and explore opportunities to unlock deep water port access for our energy resources in the Maritimes, Quebec, and the Hudson’s Bay.
Alberta will double our pipeline capacity over the next 10 years, and our oil producers will grow and fill that pipe. We will not permit Alberta’s, and Canada’s, most valuable resource deposit, worth almost $10 trillion dollars, to remain in the ground to the detriment of millions of Canadians. That’s not going to happen.
Now, having a medium and long-term plan is very important; however, what are we going to do about our budget situation in the short term? After all, we can’t just sit by, waiting and hoping for world oil prices to recover, nor can we trust the federal government to manage our immigration system in the best interests of Albertans.
So here is the short term plan.
First off, our government will not be implementing drastic cuts to social services. 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.
Albertans have learned from experience that during times of low oil prices, the key is to limit increases in spending and focus it on building the schools, health facilities, roads, and other infrastructure needed to build a strong and diversified economy with a world class standard of living.
So instead of drastic cuts in upcoming budgets, we will instead be cutting unnecessary bureaucracy, improving efficiencies in program delivery, and prioritizing needs before wants as much as possible.
We will continue to limit overall government spending increases to below inflation and population growth, implement more income testing for social programs so they are more financially sustainable, and critically, address head on the challenge of out of control immigration levels that are overwhelming our core social services.
The changes we need to make to immigration are a significant departure from the status quo, and therefore, I am seeking a referendum mandate from Albertans to implement them.
On October 19, 2026, we will be holding a provincial referendum primarily focused on how Albertans want our government to deal with the issue of immigration, as well as steps we can take as a province to strengthen our constitutional and fiscal position within a united Canada.
These were far and away the issues most strongly identified by Albertans during last year’s Alberta Next panel town halls and online submissions, and in my view, it is time to act on them.
The fact is, 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.
This is not only grossly unfair to Alberta taxpayers, but also financially crippling and undercuts the quality of our health care, education, and other social services.
The October 19th referendum will therefore include the following questions:
1. 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?
2. 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 & other social services?
3. 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?
4. 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 family’s use of the healthcare and education systems?
5. 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, we will also be asking you the following questions on the referendum ballot:
Do you support the Government of Alberta proactively working with other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution in the following ways:
A Have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeals courts.
B Abolish the unelected Federal Senate
C Allow provinces to opt out of federal programs intruding on provincial jurisdiction such as health, education, and social services, without losing any of the associated federal funding for use in their own provincial social programs.
D 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.
I look forward to the debate on these critically important ideas, and to receive your decision on the questions outlined so that our government can get to work on implementing an immigration policy that puts the needs of Albertans first, as well as constitutional reforms needed to make Alberta stronger and sovereign within a united Canada.
In closing, I want you to know how confident I am in the judgment of Albertans on these and other delicate issues. Although there are some politicians and commentators that fear direct democracy, such as referendums, I do not. I trust the judgment of Albertans.
I know that, as a province, we will thoughtfully ponder, debate and ultimately come to a wise decision on these questions that will benefit our families and our fellow Albertans for generations, just as we’ve always done.
May our beautiful province forever remain strong and free.
Thank you and good night.
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