Inventing a Problem to Support a Solution - Alberta Referendum Question One

Whether you are undecided about your answer, still needing to prep yourself for discussion with friends and neighbours or your a UCP party member looking to hate listen to Lefty, all are welcome.  We'll talk about the history of the Province, demystify the concept of the Constitutional division of powers and start Cracking a little bit into actual stats around immigration in this provice.  Most importantly we'll talk about why Danielle Smith and her team of bootlickers, sorry, her caucus, want to ask this question right now.

Spoiler: I think its potentially for the worst possible reason, butnot to worry, I don't actually think this government is competent enough to pull it off.

Transcript

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Hello everybody, welcome to Doodle Apocalypse. I'm your host, Todd, and we are here today to begin our discussion about the ridiculousness that it is to live in our current day and age. Um modeled after the ridiculousness of, say, owning a designer dog worth as much as a small car while the planet seems about to burn. I'm so glad you're here today. We're going to start a little local. Uh we're going to start. I'm I'm from Alberta, Canada, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and we're going to start with our upcoming um provincial referendum and the insanity of the questions that we are being asked. Not just the big question, the big should Alberta become its own country, uh, but in fact the whole range of ridiculousness that is being put to this electorate. With that in mind, we just want to provide a little bit of background, a little bit of insight, uh, hopefully arm you uh if you are from Alberta to make the decision on uh the 19th of October. And if you are not, to recognize some of the same patterns, uh some of the same tricks by the government in your own jurisdiction, location, hometown, home state, wherever you happen to be from. So sit down, buckle up, uh yeah, and enjoy the ride. So let's get right in. Question number one. Uh, what does it say? Well, verbatim. The question that is the first question on the referendum ballot in Alberta this fall will be Do you support the government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration, and giving Albertans first priority on new economic development? Yes or no. Big question for a yes or no. Uh, but that is what we are at. That is what it starts with. So, what we're gonna see um in this first question, and and what really is gonna be echoed in the format throughout, is that it can only really be properly understood by breaking it into two parts. What is actually being asked, and then what are we being told through the question itself? So we'll start at the start. We'll start with what we're being asked. What are what is the actual question that we're being asked to say yes or no to? And in order to that, we're gonna take a bit of a step back into our own history here in Alberta. This will be helpful throughout. So we're gonna devote a little bit of time here to some Alberta history. Um it will, as I said, it'll help when we get to the referendum, the rest of the referendum questions. It's gonna help when I get to the constitutional questions, and of course, when we get to the separation question, we'll come back to this. But even at this very first point, it is important to understand where Alberta actually came from because I don't Alberta history is not a thing that's talked about. I I grew up here, I went to school in Alberta. I don't really remember ever taking much outside of, you know, we talked a little bit about the RCMP forts, Fort Calgary, Fort Whoopup, Fort Edmonton. Uh yeah, there is actually a Fort Whoop-up. That's that's a whole other thing. The whole Lethbridge is a weird place. Um, but yeah, those original forts that uh that established colonial power in Alberta, uh, and how did it come to be a thing is just not something that's talked about. And then we're in in this episode, we'll also talk a little bit about a Canadian constitutional principle called the division of powers, something that our premier, um Danielle Smith, Danny, the big DS, uh, whatever uh we may choose to call her by at any given moment in this podcast, she t she hammers on all the time, but which I don't think most people who are listening, supporting or not uh of her position actually really understand what that means. So to begin with, uh, I want to make it clear that I fully recognize that people have lived on the land that has now been cordoned off, given boundaries, and called Alberta, Canada for somewhere in the ballpark of 10 millennia. Basically, you know, there had been people living in Alberta for 5,000 years by the time the pyramids were built, by the time Mycia sacked Troy, current events, go see the Odyssey, very good. Um, but by the time that happened, five millennia of people had been living in Alberta. Uh, they continued, those same people continued to occupy the land continuously until the first European colonizers showed up here in the 1700s. I'm I'm not going to talk a lot about this in this history, not because I don't recognize it or think it's important, but because it's obvious that Daniel Smith and her her political party, the United Conservatives, don't. Um, so it's not something that has been used to contextualize the questions as they create them, um, when they actually still think that God was about, you know, 4,000 years from thinking up Adam and Eve when the Blackfoot first rolled up on the shores of the Bow River. Also fully aware, topography was different, geology nerds, it's a joke. Back off. We don't need to talk about what rivers were actually here. But we will we will come back to the indigenous history of Alberta in subsequent episodes because I do think it's important, it is absolutely essential to some of the questions that are being asked. But the first ones are about immigration. And so, since we're not going to get into the fact that maybe all the immigrants, including the early Europeans from the 1700s, should be ejected, because I don't think that's what she's trying to give herself. And when I say she, it's Daniel Smith, I don't think that's the power she's trying to give herself. Um, but uh we will get back to some of those as as we come down. But so we're gonna pick up around the 1700s. It was pretty much just early fur traders and explorers, some headed through to British Columbia, some trying to find their way other ways into the U.S. that show up in the 1700s, but there wasn't a huge European uh expansion till we get into the 1800s, mostly because there wasn't an easy way in and out. It's a big country, huge country. I've got one of the things to remember as a kid, I have extended family who were from Britain. They visited when I was as when I was very young. Um, and one of the first things they talk about is they hadn't really comprehended how long the train trip from where they got off the plane of Montreal to Calgary was. Many days, many days of prairies. Uh it's a long trip, it's a big place. And if you didn't have trains, you didn't have cars, you didn't have boats with power, you just had canoes and feet and horses, it was really hard to get resources out. So that even though there was a a broad understanding of how valuable it would be, there wasn't a lot of effort put into expanding the colonies until those, until we got into the 1800s and that larger, larger connection, until there were ships coming up the west side, uh, there wasn't a huge amount of interest. But between um between that point, so from the 1700s and until the early 1800s, um I didn't realize this until looking into this further. Alberta and actually much of Western and Central Canada was all part of the Louisiana Purchase. So when the US government bought all of that Western territory from the French uh government, bought the Louisiana Fran French-Spanish uh settlement, that was all included in 1803. Uh and it stayed that way until 1818, when all the territory above the 49th parallel that had been bought as part of that expansion was ceded to the British in the Treaty of 1818, which was effectively done to end the hostility between the British colonies and the and the New American one, uh New American states. At that point, it was still really an economic territory called the Northwest Territory, and it was in the control of the Hudson's Bay Company. The Hudson's Bay Company, once again, fun history lesson, at the time was basically being the chilly cold weather equivalent of the East India Trading Company. Um, you know, the the baddies from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and and the like. The Hudson's Bay Company plundered really the entire territory territory, called the Northwest Territory, because it was northwest of Rupert's Land, which was their original colony and territory. So everything to the north and west of Rupert's land, effectively, Ontario was the Northwest Territory. I know, super creative guys. Definitely not falling down on the job there in naming. And it that continued until 1870, which was three years after uh the Canada had actually entered into Confederation, had become its own uh nation, though it was still a colony, um, but had uh the Constitution had been signed and confederation had started. Um so Ontario, and then included Ontario and Quebec and the eastern provinces or some of the eastern provinces, uh, but it didn't include the Northwest Territories until 1870. Um at that point the Crown, so the the British government actually forced control of the territory from the Hudson's Bay Company, made them just set up a mall in every major city. Um if you don't know that, you didn't, you know, then you're obviously not from Canada and you haven't traveled east-west up until a couple years ago, when generally, genuinely every every major city had a bay store in the downtown. Uh, and every one of those was a descendant of that colonizing force that uh that ripped through the northern part of America right up until 1870. Anyway, British Crown forces the Hudson's Bay Company, um, which was essentially a crown subsidiary, to hand over all that territory and hand it into the control of the Dominion of Canada. The between 1876 and 1899, the Crown also came across and started signing treaties with the indigenous nations. Um, and Treaties 68 were signed in that 1876 to 1899 window. Uh, these treaties created gave title and control of the land to the British Crown, but not over ownership, which is an important distinction, which we'll be we will talk about more when we talk about uh the movement for separation. But those those treaties were signed effectively, giving some legal backing, distorted and uh uh distorted and untruthful as it may have been, some legal backing to allow the British Crown to start moving west. And in 1882, the district of Alberta was created along with the Athabasca, Saskatchewan, Assiniboya, and Manitoba districts out of what had once been the old Northwest Territory. Uh this district didn't look a lot like modern-day Alberta except for that fun little backslash that is the southern border with BC, because British Columbia was a distinct territory. It wasn't part of the Northwest Territories. It was its own place, so there had always been that border along the southern edge of the Rockies. And then finally in 1905, the current borders were set, so Alberta was able to expand north up to the edge of what is still today the Northwest Territories and gain the status of province within the Dominion, along with Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which had been elevated to that status a few years before. Nowhere in there, since the settlers came and since the Blackfoot, Nakota, and Cree signed their treaties, was Alberta an independent state or nation. Alberta as a province has actually it's younger than the Stanley Cup. 1905. We do there is not this long, deep history of Alberta. It was an administrative area that only became a province in 1905. So we'll discuss that a lot more in coming episodes. Um but that is the key thing. The powers that Danielle Smith and her party are asking for, they were never taken away. They haven't been alienated. Alberta didn't cede its immigration rights to join the Dominion. What we have is what we have always had. It is the relationship on which our federation was built, on which our province was built, on which our system of government was built, is that is how it was set up now. Every other premier in the history of Alberta and in the history of this country has been able to figure out how to manage their province without these expanded powers that the UCP wants. So why is Danielle Smith the only pro premier who is only going to be capable of providing a strong province, a strong economy, if she is granted all these powers over immigration? A question that I think is, you know, it's it's rhetorical, but it's genuinely worth placing in our minds uh if we're assessing the why this should or should not be necessary. So, what are those powers that she's actually asking about when she's talking about having expanded immigration powers? Well, my fellow Albertans and policy government nerds, let me tell you, let's talk about that. So the Canadian Constitution, specifically the oldest part, the British North America Act, set out the basic division of powers between the federal and provincial governments. That's where it all comes from. Uh 1867, this act, it was actually an act of the British Parliament, because we, although Canada was becoming an independent nation, it was still a colony. It's still technically answered, not technically, actually, very directly still answered to the British Parliament, the British courts, the British Crown. So this act of the British Parliament uh to set up Canada as a Confederation of provinces uh in section 91, and we won't go through it in detail. I you can look all this up online. There's copies available to anyone. You can have the government will send you a lovely free, laminated, nicely printed copy at any time that you like. Um, but section 91 lays out all the federal powers. So those are things which the federal government and only the federal government has authority over. Section 92 is the provincial powers, once again, equally distinct. Only a provincial government can make laws in those areas. If either government, federal or provincial touches the other one's set of base powers in 91 or 92, then the the legislation that would go there is considered what's called ultraveres. Nice Latin term. That is your Latin word for the episode. Uh, two words, actually. Latin words. Beyond the power, uh ultraveries. So if they if they touch the other the other government's area of authority, then they that law is invalid, instantly invalid, because it is considered ultraverse. Uh it's a little more nuanced than that, but that is what it basically comes down to. Um section 93 is education. Well, we we may talk about that a little bit later, but it's uh interesting that that was considered so fundamental that it's built into the Constitution. Section 94 is a funny one because it's about the uniformity of property and civil rights across the country, that the rights, how you own land, who can own land, who has basic civil rights is to be universal province to province. Um that is once again a fundamental principle of the Canadian uh experiment, as it were. And then finally, Section 95, the last of the provincial or provincial federal uh division of power section, talks about authority over agriculture and immigration. And why do those two get discussed together, but separate from everything else? Excellent question, Todd. Thanks for asking it. Um, it gives us an insight really into the thought process of those who were drafting the Constitution, what they thought was important, and interesting what was similar and different between then and then and now. Canada's economic uh economy and background in 1867 was agriculture, even more so than now. I mean, we're most of Canada, if you look at it uh from a satellite picture, is just big collections of farmland uh stretching across the middle part of the country. Um it was then as well, but it was being built up. And so in order to expand that agriculture, where before you had machines, before you had all the automation, what it took was people and bodies. And so, in order to expand that heart, expand that ability to grow food, expand that export market, you had to bring people in. It it you could not just wait for them to become homegrown. There was no, you know, well, we'll just hold on and then they'll have these amazing super integrated farming machines. No, what you need is hands to swing axes, to swing scythes, to plant seed, to all of those things, they were going to take bodies. And so agriculture and immigration in early Canada were inextricably linked. There was also the fact that uh, you know, Jay Mack, uh, John A. MacDonald and his crew of visionary drunken racists, that's not shade, all three things, definitively true, um, knew that bringing in more people, specifically ideally European and British, absolute must. Um, really also because they were trying to push out the indigenous peoples, either through forcing them physically off the land, starving them out, um, or breeding them out, whatever it took, but however they could get the indigenous people out. So they were trying to expand the expand the agriculture, expand the industrial base, all those things. It's basically expand Canada. You needed people to do that. So agriculture, immigration, uh become linked, and in the background, we also know racism, because we would just wanted more Europeans. Last we could have given more land to the indigenous peoples. There's lots of ways that we could have done that differently. Um, but we wanted more Europeans, more white Europeans, to come and work our farms. So even though the federal government actually had control of the borders, and that's always important to remember, is that immigration is not the same as border control. The federal government has has all the power over the borders. The provinces also needed to say in who went where once they'd crossed that border to make sure that those resources were distributed to the places they needed to go. So Section 95 actually interestingly creates a power sharing agreement. The feds get to decide who comes into the country, who's allowed to cross the borders, and then the provinces have a constitutionally enshrined say in where they go within the provinces. And no province is able to pass a law about internal immigration that the it would be what they called repugnant to the federal statutes. I just got to say, legal drafting is so much better in the 1800s. Yes, it was intentionally incomprehensible to make sure that the poor and uneducated couldn't read their own laws, but God, it was so much prettier. Anyway, what it basically comes down to is the federal government can, according to the Constitution, pass any law that rules, overrules the province if they need to. They can make if they make something where the federal law and the provincial law don't line up, the federal law will always win. But there is supposed to be a balance, a split between the two, so that both levels of government have a say uh to the betterment of the entire country. The other pieces which are important uh to this discussion are section six and fifteen of the Charter on Rights of Freedoms, a piece of the Constitution which came along a little over 120 years after, a little less than 120 years actually, uh, after the British North America Act. Uh it's that pesky universal document that's supposed to protect everybody's rights the same unless Daniel Smith and the UCP find those rights inconvenient to, say, a labor negotiation, and then they will just pass legislation that tells you to shut up and go home. Well, it'll tell you to shut up and go home, but don't worry we supervalue you as long as you do what you're told. Section six of the Charter says that no citizen or says that all citizens have the right to free movement between the provinces, including the right to work in any province. It's pretty cut and dry. If Daniel Smith wants to keep undesirables out of her realm, she has to do it before they get citizenship. And I do think this is important. Before they get citizen citizenship, no citizen can be blocked from moving around within the country or blocked from the ability to get a job in one province, even if they come from another one. Um yeah, I I think that gets reflected a lot as we talk about it. Talk about these these questions more and more. I think if given the opportunity, this government would love to put up just walls to Nova Scotians and uh Newfoundlanders and Ontarians and just keep everybody out, but they can't. And so they're gonna start with people who are not yet citizens. Section 15 of the Charter also says that no one can be discriminated against on the basis of race, nationality, ethnicity, color, sex, age, religion, or disability. Uh, this one is also interesting because even though the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution, what she has used to override certain sections of the Charter, um, so they could theoretically overrule some of these, Section 6 and Section 15. But I would be curious because once again, Pesky Section 95 of the BNA says the province can't make an immigration law that is repugnant to any federal law. So if you made an immigration law, which was actually repugnant to the charter, even though you could use the notwithstanding clause, I am curious to see the legal opinion saying whether or not section 95 and that repugnancy clause would still say nope, you can't actually use the notwithstanding clause. It doesn't matter because your your piece of legislation is still repugnant to the federal law. Anyway, her new favorite toy might be broken is really what it comes down to with immigration. And that's probably why she hasn't just done this already. Um she feels that there is some questionability um as far as whether or not a fundamentally racist um immigration law uh could be held up even with the notwithstanding clause. So, what this all boils down to is the federal government has had an agreement with the province of Alberta, a full, formal, written, no-jokes contract between the two levels of government that governs how the two that governs how the two governments will balance their responsibilities. And the current version of this agreement has been in place since 2007, you know, when the great conservative Albertan Ubermensch Stephen Harper was prime minister. You can give it a read. Um I can put the link up, or you can just look up um look up the immigration agreement, the Alberta federal government immigration agreement. Um give it a read yourself, see what's in there. It's not terribly complicated, but Daniels, what it really says is Daniel Smith has all the power she needs and is ever going to get already. It's baked into the Constitution in this agreement. She has the ability to come back to the federal government to limit who comes in and who doesn't. She has the ability to ask for more or less. And it is so important to help us understand why this is a problem that she created that doesn't actually exist, largely because she can do it. She has the power she needs right now. She has a majority government. She could do this right now. She could renegotiate the agreement if she wanted to. But that would actually require acknowledging that good old Steve Owen made a mistake, which most Alberta conservatives are not yet willing to take that weight on. And it would, of course, take time. And what Danny is dying to do is make a grand-sweeping Trump-style executive decision. You know, she's watching stateside, watching how great that's working and how it's got people running and hiding. If she wants to negotiate a different number, she's free to do so, like she did in 2024, when she specifically asked the prime minister for increased immigration and the feds complied. She is asking us to tell her to do the things she could be doing now and should theoretically already be doing as part of her mandate as premier. Whether you agree with her policy is not, or not, as premier, she doesn't actually need to ask us. This is coming back to my issue about the direct democracy. She doesn't need to ask us. She is the government. She, in fact, should be putting it forward so that we know exactly what she wants to do so that people are motivated to vote her out in the next election. If she never does it, then people can sit back and say, yeah, she says a lot of things but doesn't really do it. She should have to do it. If she wants to do it, do it so that people know who you are and they can vote accordingly. But if she doesn't need to ask the question, then why is she? Why are we doing this now? Why are we spending all this time and resource now to do this? We'll look into that after a little break. And we are back. So as we left off, we we got some we have a little background, a little bit of a chat about where Alb Alberta came from, what our current immigration setup is, what powers the federal and provincial government have, and not a huge amount of detail, I understand. If you, you know, poli sci uh professor could be cutting these apart for days and days and days. But the basics being Alberta is not a state. It never has been a state, it never has had control over borders or more significant control over immigration, but it has a great deal of power right now to say who it wants in the province and who it doesn't. So if it had, if we have all of this power, taking the long walk that we did to show how much power the Alberta provincial government has over immigration, why are we spending this time being asked this question? Why is Danielle Smith asking us this question? And that is the fundamental question. It's but the it's not why is she asking right now? It's why is she asking us this question? Why this one? Short of providing a province with the powers of the entire nation, Danielle Smith has everything she's ever going to get regarding immigration and arguably all the powers she should need to run a province within the Confederation. So why this question? And I think to really answer that, we have to look at now what the question is telling us, what the the actual wording of this question is is trying to get across and teach us from their perspective. And that all really starts to come at and around the word purpose in the original question. The first thing, and this comes just before purpose, but it's it's relevant to all the phrasing that comes afterwards is the term control. What is she saying greater control would look like? She doesn't spoiler alert, we don't know. There is no more detail about what control would look like. She just wants more of it. Does that mean she'd have more, does she just want more bargaining power in the agreement that we talked about before with immigration control about who comes into the country and who doesn't? You know, she arguably she has all the power she needs over Alberta. Does she want to now control who comes to Saskatchewan, who comes to Nova Scotia, who heads to the Yukon, who heads on to in heads up to Ontario? You know, this is really classic neocon ideology that we see all over the United States, and more and more so in Canada. You know, just like the Republican Party is slathering to control what other people do with their bodies, whether they be a gay person, a trans person, whether they be a woman, the we know the Republican Party wants to control the other. This could very well be exactly what Daniel Smith wants. She wants to control everybody's immigrants. Ostensibly, I'm sure, because of Section 66, which lets people move freely from province to province, she thinks, well, I must control who then ends up in Manitoba, because one day they could try to come to Alberta. But in her world, a deeply a world deeply tainted by MAGA, by Trump, by that whole insane culture, it's not good enough to just control who comes into your house. You also must control who lives next door. And beyond that, the door after that. And in ever-increasing circles of power and control, um, eventually control the world. But once again, that's a depressing podcast for another day. But that's really it. We have all the power that we need for Alberta. Part of this is starting to overreach into other areas. After purpose, she starts to discuss what control would mean in relation to maintaining sustainable levels, with no mention of what a sustainable level even is. We we know who gets to pick what a sustainable level is, and that will be Danielle Smith and the UCP who get to declare what a sustainable level is. And if the UCP are getting to pick it, then it's Alberta's ranchers, farmers, small towners who get to pick it because that's who they consider their base is. That's who they're listening to, as we'll talk about in future episodes. That's why it's those opinions that are why we're even at being asked this question right now. But these are also people who hardly see an immigrant. They have probably seen one, two maybe in their actual hometowns in their entire life. Uh, but they get, they will get to make sure they never have to see another one. The sad thing is this also means it's just a purely political tool. Daniel Smith and her cronies are willing to wield the lives of immigrants, real people with worries, hopes, and dreams, who just happen to have been born in the 99.87% of the planet that is not called Alberta. They get to wield those lives purely for their own power, their own selfish, pathetic, tiny political power and gains. Two years ago, she asked for a huge increase in immigration. Uh that's been well covered. And that was because it suited her base. That was because she was primarily looking to add additional Ukrainian refugees to the farms in northern and central Alberta. That worked for her base, so then she was willing to ask for more for more immigrants. I don't want to give her party credit for consistency, but it was just a different kind of racism, then a different forum of positive racist racism. All you have to do is read the letter. It doesn't talk about just wanting, you know, we've framed it like, oh, Daniel Smith, or the media has framed it, like, oh, Daniel Smith, she used to be, she used to love immigration, now she doesn't. No, she never loved immigration. She loved more white people coming into the province. She loved more white people who knew how to farm and were useful to her rancher friends coming into the province and getting citizenship. That's what she wanted. And that's what she was willing to push for. And now that that's not who's coming in, and in the next episode, we'll talk more about the demographics of who actually is coming in as an immigrant into this country. Um she's not interested anymore. And please don't take this to say that I think we shouldn't have been supporting Ukrainian refugees. I think the West largely caused the issues between Russia and the Ukraine, uh, and that they, the Ukrainian refugees, like most refugees, have been abandoned and they deserve our support. But really, the biggest difference between them and most of the non-economic migrants that she wants to give the boot, color of their skin and where they're from. They're her people, and so she'd like to keep them here. Do we have any hint really at what we think or what she thinks a reasonable level is? Well, the government website, so the the provincial government website, um, references the limits in section in 2014, back under Stephen Harper, and that that should be their benchmark. That was sustainability. And and sure, that's that's fine. Let's forget all the Conservative Party and Stephen Harper's abundant flaws outside of his hair or helmet, sort of half-inflated gray beach ball, whatever that was he kept in his head. Out of those things, let's put all of that aside and say that's a totally reasonable and acceptable standard. 2014, the immigration levels into Alberta, that was okay. Guess what? We're already there. Immigration in 2025 almost exactly mirrors the trends in 2014, and that is carrying through into 2026. And they knew this when this referendum was put out. It's not like these numbers, the the immigration numbers were released yesterday. Yeah, they weren't in their entirety because the questions were released in June, and I think uh I don't know if they got all the way to Q4 uh in announcing immigration numbers. But they knew that. They knew what the numbers were. They're using 2024 as a reference point, and we are already there, people. So if we've reached that level, well, why don't we just cancel these questions? What's the point? Uh, once again, because it's not really about bulk immigration numbers. Um but if so, if we're already reached, if we've reached the level, we're getting everything you want, in no small part because Stephen Harper's really good friend just switched parties and is now running the country. What are we doing here? Why are we spending all this money? Why are we spending all this effort? Well, the second purpose, as it's discussed in the question, the second bit of indoctrination, is to promote economic migration. So if you aren't already aware, if you've never had to put your mind to this before, economic migration is just when people choose to move nations, not because they're under threat or because they want to reunite with family. It's when the primary motivator is to improve or change their financial prospects, basically get better jobs, uh, earn more money. From the receiving government's perspective, encouraging economic migration is really about encouraging people to come to you who either have money already, have training already, who can fill specific gaps in your workforce more quickly than training your own people, or who are at least not going to cost you anything. They're supported in the in their new environment, and they won't jump in and be, they'll start off as a net neutral or a net positive. In the end, this is what we're already doing. If you if you talk to anyone who's made the very difficult jump to Canadian citizen citizenship, they will tell you it is already already fundamentally economic migration. To understand the depth of the situation as a naturalized citizen who's never had to navigate the system, you have to look a little bit about at how that system works. Uh, first of all, the fight is is actually for permanent residency. It's a small thing, you know, uh small difference, but it you people don't really have to fight for citizenship. Citizenship is essentially, at least in Canada, it's a function of time and paperwork. Once a person is granted permanent residence status and they're here long enough and they pay their taxes and they don't commit any crimes and they're just they they fill out the proper paperwork, they will be granted citizenship if they want it at a future point. Lots of people decide not to ever go for full citizenship. They want to maintain the citizenship of their homeland, but they will keep their permanent residency in Cam Canada because that's when most of the rights and privileges come in. That means they're working, that means they're contributing, that means they're part of the fabric of society. Um, they just haven't necessarily gone and signed the paperwork. And once again, it's it is just paperwork, really. So the fight is for permanent residency and citizenship will come to those who want it down the road. Uh so and when Daniel Smith and and and her cronies are asking the questions about legal residents and citizens, they're really they're just talking about permanent the permanent residency program. Uh, if you're a permanent resident, if they can't, you know, drop a can't drop a baggie on you and make you commit a crime, you're you can have citizenship if you want it. And there's four primary ways to get permanent residency status in Alberta. Well, in in Canada, also in Alberta. The first is what is just blatantly called the economic pathway, as straightforward as it sound sounds. This is the preferred method for any level of government. This means that you either came here with a job all lined up in the full sponsorship of the business employing you. Now, not every employee move is going to be a permanent resident. Uh, it generally requires not just that you have a job, but that you also have enough cash that you can prove that you have um that basically you buy your way to the top of the line. Independent financial wealth to pay for the express program. It's literally called that on the government website. I'm not making that up. It you you have enough money to pay to get into the country quickly. Um, either no matter what, government loves you, you got lots of cash. We love more rich people um no matter what. Uh so the that one's obvious. Um the second way is the provincial nominee program. And this is also one of the primary ways in which provincial governments can impact immigration decisions. They will nominate a certain number of people for permanent or for permanent residency. Um, they will specifically pick out people who, like the Ukrainian immigrants in 2024, uh, have specific skills, specific jobs, specific connections to the community that the province will be valuable. These are the slots actually that Daniel Smith was asking for in 2024. She wanted more provincial nominee slots to be able to take Ukrainian asylum seekers and turn them into permanent residents so that they could head off to citizenship. Outside of those first two ways, you can also be sponsored by a family member or community. This is basically so someone's got family that already has residency or citizenship, or very often a church or a community group will sponsor people who are coming to the country for the first time. And when they do sponsor them, they're basically saying we will help them to be good citizens, we will help financially support them so they're not a burden on the system, keep that new pre permanent resident from becoming an issue in any way. Um so once again, it's really just a form of economic, economic migration, saying that no, we will make sure they're good. We will privately make sure that these individuals will not become a burden on our system. We got it. Don't worry about it. The economics of the arrangement look good. All three of these types, just economic migration. The fourth group uh or the fourth pathway to permanent residency is to come from the temporary resident program. Sort of worked your way through, basically. And the temporary residents also fall into four groups. So, first of all, we have what are temporary workers. They came here, they had a specific job once again, sponsored by uh a company, but unlike the economic pathway, uh, they didn't have permanent residency granted as part of that job. We know the temporary foreign worker program has been batted around as a political hot potato for a few years. This was part of that. Basically just saying, look, we need a bunch of farmhands, we need a bunch of uh steel laborers, we need a bunch of computer programmers. We it'll take us 10 years to train them. Uh, we need them right now, so let's bring them in from somewhere else, but they aren't going to be allowed to stay. Generally, the wages are not great in these positions. Um, but the other reality of it is these people are paying taxes. From day one, they they pay Canadian taxes on everything they learn they earn. So they are contributing to society. They are not tipping the scales of unsustainability that the UCP is is supposedly targeting. Um, everything's paid for, everything's taken care of. Uh now, if the funds they're bringing in are being, oh, I don't know, mismanaged by the provincial government, then it can look like they are not bringing enough. But really, that's not their fault. They're coming in, they're paying taxes. If the UCP and the provincial government can't get their act together to turn those tax dollars into the hospitals and the schools and the roads and the housing that they need, once again, that is not a failure of the immigrant, that is a failure of their government. But if it's not them, if it's not temporary workers, who might it be? Well, let's look at the rest of the list. So the next one is students. Um, the next temporary group, students. International students, another group like temporary foreign workers that took a load of heat in the last few years as a scapegoat, particularly in the housing crisis. But in Alberta, you know, we also they get sort of side-eye blamed for uh educ for the K-12 education system, for overloads on the healthcare system, all these sorts of things. Um, so we know huge steps were taken to curtail them, and their numbers have gone through the floor. And lo and behold, even though we have massively cut the number of international students, and every level of government has now scooched back from this argument because that did nothing to help any of these crises. We have a fraction of the international students that we had uh three or four years ago. We don't have any more houses. It didn't suddenly solve that middle gap in housing. It didn't suddenly unburden all of our emergency rooms and hospitals by sending all those kids home. It had no effect on our cost of living whatsoever, because there was never that many of them to begin with. They were never causing the problem. All it really did was cripple the operating budgets of multiple universities who rely on tuition dollars they bring in. Uh McGill, one of Canada's most prestigious, if not highest uh ranked and most looked up to university in Quebec, uh, recently cut tons of its uh uh sports programs in particular because it just couldn't afford to fund them anymore, because the tuition dollars from international students were used to fund all of those programs. And when we keep in mind that education universities are provincial responsibility, they may not be paying taxes, these international students, largely because we don't let them work when they're here, but they do pay tuition. Tuition poured into provincially funded, provincially managed universities. Just another form of provincial provincial tax, which has been shown again and again to be painfully mismanaged by this government. Now there's fewer programs, there's fewer spots, and those spots that are left are being funded out of your tax dollars more than any before any time before. So it's probably not the international temporary students that she's trying to get rid of. Third group is visitors. Don't you know, these are not your weekenders from Maine or even a European ski tripper. These are visitors who are here for long periods from the from states and nations that we were required to have visas to travel to Canada. They're already barred from using most social services other than emergency services, and they come and they basically just pump money into the economy. Um, this, of course, doesn't include Aussie workers in Banff, if you've ever been. The fact that every single service industry in the town of Banff is being worked. I won't let's go 90. Let's let's be conservative and say 90% of those service industries in Banff are being held up by kids from Australia and New Zealand primarily. They're under the temporary work program. So they're not visitors, they're not here on vacation, they're here to work and ski. Um but yeah, the visitor group, no reason to be mad with them, they're just here to pour dollars in. So who's left? Who's group number four? Well, we've talked about them a little bit. They've come up here and there. That is our asylum seekers. Refugees whose claims are still being reviewed are the final group of temporary residents. They are temporary residents and they're referred to as asylum seekers because they are their claim is in, but if it's rejected, we will the federal government will require them to leave. There was a time not so long ago where our ability to offer a few our ability to offer a future to those whose homes had become a form of hell was a point of pride for Canadians. And maybe the fact it still is as part of why Danny and her team want to leave Canada so badly. They just can't stand the fact that that is something that people would be excited about. But after taking this long walk, the only group that makes any sense for her and her party to be targeting is the asylum seeker. But why? Why is this group of supposedly Christian or otherwise fundamentally religious politicians so hell-bent on taking the lives of the downtrodden and to be quite frank, trotting them even farther down? We could spend months trying to unpack the misery that is the motivation behind today's Christian right and their remarkably unchristian values, but at the core in this debate, it's pretty simple. She needs a scapegoat. And that brings us back to why she is asking us this particular question. Danielle Smith doesn't need to ask it. She has all the power she's asking for already, and by electing her, ill guided as that decision may have been, she was provided with the authority to use it. I hate to say it like I'm daring her to do it, but she has this already. She has a mandate. She has one of the strongest. It's Alberta. If you're a conservative government, you can fundamentally do what you want. So why ask? She's asking the question so she can tell us the answer. In the second half of the question, she lays out all the problems she wants us to believe that immigrants are causing. She's asking the question because she knows this gets her justifications out in front of people, and not in some suspicious partisan ad way, in a way that many will interpret as being supported by the government itself and therefore trustworthy. The question is written in such a way to make disagreeing with the premise sound like an impossibility. If you say no, it makes it feel like you owe your neighbor an explanation about why what you Think the solution is. That's the key here in discussing and debating with Albertans around you. Don't debate the question, debate the reason for the question. In the next few episodes, we will dig more into the hard numbers that make it clear that immigration is not actually a problem. And we must be adamant about this. Immigration isn't a problem. It is not contributing to the struggles that Danielle Smith claims she's trying to fix with this expansion of powers. We don't need to debate whether or not this is the solution when the problem itself isn't real. But if it isn't real, why if it isn't real, and the question is unnecessary, why are millions and millions of tax dollars being spent to ask the question? Well, two possible reasons, uh, as I see it anyway. Um first, it's just pure distraction. This is a terrible government. The UCP government is is inept. They've mismanaged healthcare, education, natural resources, pensions, public safety, public transit, libraries, flags. Name a topic, name an area of authority given to them under the Constitution, and the UCP have fucked it up. And they just need someone to blame. They are blaming trans kids as much as they can, but that's such a tiny fraction of the population that even the most closed-minded backwater hick from small town Alberta can't actually believe that that's the source of all of our woes. They might be bringing the devil to Alberta, but they aren't using up all the houses. So next it's got to become the immigrants. These are just cliches being pulled straight out of the U.S. MAGA handbook, straight out of the latest wave of right-wing populism. Can't blame it on the trans, can't blame it on the queer kids, blame it on the immigrants. The immigrants are immigrate, recent immigrants to the to the province of Alberta are a tiny popul part of our population that remains immensely terrifying to people whose idea of diversity is planting wheat next to corn. They've whipped their base into believing that all of our issues are because of recent immigrants and that this circus will bring a few people along while also making sure that even when these questions lose, they can go back to their base who loved them with their hands out saying, look, it's not our fault. We tried. We tried to keep that single family of Sikh farmers, three towns owner, from buying that piece of land next to your friend and ruining your community. But Calgary and Edmonton wouldn't let us. The other possibility, the other reason she might be answering this question is even more upsetting. If you haven't read Naomi Klein's book, uh Shock Doctrine, and if you haven't, you should, uh this questi the situation just starts to feel far too familiar. The UCP has already started dismantling any core social program it can, from education and healthcare to transit and bloody bike lanes. And it's signaling that more changes are coming, specifically more privatization. Danny, for all the world, looks like the w freedman acolytes discussed in Shock Doctrine, who believe that a wholly deregulated market is the only possible future, and that that state can only be reached by blowing up any semblance of a social safety net. And if you can't get a really nice natural disaster or organize civil war, well, then build one. So and foment rage and discontent amongst the people until everything is so broken they have no choice to call out to the billionaires and the venture capitalists to save them. This is the model from the shock doctrine, as Klein showed again and again. The architects of these disasters make their fortunes before leaving their people to sift through the ruins, and no one is there to thank them for their great capitalist revolutions. The mere possibility that this is the case just makes it more and more imperative that we, as Albertans, as Canadians and as decent people, don't just sit back and let this happen. It's time to have the hard conversations to keep our neighborhoods from breaking and our social ties from shattering. Because what comes next to pick up the pieces will do so with profit as its only motivator, and no interest in returning what was lost in the process. As we hit the remaining questions, we'll talk in detail about the numbers behind the false immigration crisis. We'll shine a little light on what the provincial government actually pays for and find parallels for societies that make their weakest pay the highest price just to survive. But until then, just reflect on the fact that Daniel Smith knows exactly what she's doing. And so we need to know it too. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for coming along on this little journey with us, looking at question one of the 2026 Alberta referendum. Hopefully you'll stick around or come back in a couple of days when we talk about question two and further dig in to the issues facing Albertans uh in the October 19th questions. Um just a couple of quick plugs out there. So if you enjoyed this, I do have a slightly more lighthearted podcast as well called Gen Z vs. Friends, which is exactly what it sounds like. Uh, where I sit back, uh re-watch and uh try and dig into whether or not, you know, my favorite show from the 90s is as bad as well, not my kids, I don't have kids, as bad as your kids think it is, or is is it as good as we remember? So please do tune into that as well. This podcast and Gen Z versus Friends are entirely human created. There is no AI involved. Um, so please come and support your fellow humans. Once again, thank you so much, and hopefully we'll get to talk again soon.