Alberta premier asks voters to bypass Indigenous rights

There is a standard playbook that politicians use when they have mismanaged an economy, want to divert attention from a scandal, or violate citizen rights and the law.

Blame the brown people.

No, this isn’t about U.S. President Donald Trump — but note how easy it was to assume that.

This is about Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

“On October 19, 2026, we will hold a provincial referendum,” Smith announced Thursday, “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.”

Smith’s referendum will include nine questions, with five about how the province can take “increased control over immigration” and restrict how immigrants vote and use the province’s health care and education systems.

Smith said due to former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s “open border immigration policies… Alberta grew by almost 600,000 people to more than five million, all the 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.”

I’ll return to the “throttling” of Alberta’s “most important job creating industries” in a minute, but for now let’s focus on Smith’s boogeyman of the week: immigrants.

According to nearly every credentialed academic study, immigrants are not the disease infecting Alberta’s economy. That distinction belongs to a series of unsustainable, populist and private-industry pleasing decisions by decades of Alberta governments.

For instance, the reduction of good housing and high-paying jobs in the province isn’t related to newcomers but by a failure to manage home development and diversify the economy.

Deregulation and the empowerment of private interests to take over nearly every industry in the province is far more to blame than any of the cheap international workers they exploit in order to pay their shareholders handsome dividends.

I could go on and talk about billion-dollar banks hellbent on profit-driven interest rates or how Alberta schools have turned to international students due to funding cuts or how asylum seekers make up a tiny fraction of newcomers, but you get the picture.

In other words, inviting Albertans to focus on immigration over the next eight months keeps them from focusing on the real issues impacting the economy and, more directly, Smith’s own health-care scandal involving allegations that her office encouraged Alberta Health Services to sign contracts with private health facilities.

By pointing a finger at specifically brown people, Smith is hoping Alberta won’t look at the three fingers pointing back at herself.

This brings me to the other four questions in Smith’s referendum.

Those questions have to do with amending the Canadian constitution to allow for the province to appoint its own King’s Bench and Appeal court judges, help abolish the Senate, “opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction” and “protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws.”

With the exception of the Senate question (a time-honoured populist Alberta complaint), the others are driven by a primary interest: undermining Indigenous rights.

Smith has, for all of her time as a politician, abhorred the way Indigenous rights have undermined what she calls “Alberta’s economic potential.”

“We will not permit Alberta’s and Canada’s most valuable resource deposit, worth almost $10 trillion, to remain in the ground to the detriment of millions of Canadians. That’s not going to happen,” she said in announcing the referendum.

As evidenced by Smith’s memorandum with Prime Minister Mark Carney last November, the federal government isn’t looking to stand in the way of Smith’s dream to construct bitumen pipelines.

The only thing in the way of her vision is Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, which requires the federal government to “recognize and affirm existing Aboriginal and treaty rights for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada.”

B.C. First Nations have said that a pipeline across their territories won’t happen due to the devastation it would cause to their rights, culture and way of life. First Nations in Alberta have said that any pipeline must legally and economically include them.

Last December, in a case involving the legality of Alberta separation, a federally appointed King’s Bench judge determined that all First Nations who share treaties with the Crown in the province must consent to anything involving their territories.

In other words, Smith’s goal with this referendum is to establish the parameters in which she could make her own constitutional rules and appoint her own judges, and therefore get decisions that would allow the province to bypass Indigenous rights.

Add that to controlling immigration and that’s called a bingo.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca