‘Shameless’: How the Alberta Next Panel Blamed Immigrants

In March 1993, four months into her tenure as Alberta’s minister of multiculturalism and human rights, Dianne Mirosh questioned why Alberta could not select immigrants the way Quebec did, adding, “It would be nice to have immigrants who have at least an understanding of English.”

Without evidence, Mirosh, a blunt-spoken Calgary politician, claimed there was a connection between poor immigrant language skills and Asian youth gangs. She said immigrants who needed language training were a drain on the provincial treasury. And, again without evidence, she claimed immigrants were dumping seniors onto the social welfare system.

Over the next two months, the Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal published more than 50 stories in response to Mirosh’s statements.

Letters to the editor pages were filled with correspondence from people who said they were appalled by her racism and from those who said Mirosh was merely airing their same grievances.

Immigrant community leaders reported an increase in fear for personal safety amid an uptick in racist public harassment.

Mirosh was nonetheless re-elected in June of that same year after an acidulous campaign during which swastikas were spray-painted on her election signs.

Fast-forward to July 15, 2025. At an Alberta Next event in Red Deer, one of several stops in a provincewide tour created and funded by the United Conservative Party government of Premier Danielle Smith, the moderator invited Sumita Anand to speak to some 450 people assembled.

The panel of 16 hand-picked Albertans, which included Smith and Anand, ended its series of "town hall" meetings in various communities across Alberta on Sept. 29. The panel was supposed to gather feedback about issues that the UCP has deemed to be pressing, including immigration reform, an Alberta income tax, pension plan and police force, and allegedly unfair federal equalization payments.

Anand was invited to speak as one of three first-generation immigrants on the panel. She chose to blame recent immigrants for economic challenges in the province.

“When I moved here to Alberta, 30 years back with two small kids, we moved because homes were unaffordable in Vancouver and Toronto and jobs were easily available,” Anand said.

“Now the struggle is we have these immigrants that are coming in, they are taking away our children’s and grandchildren’s jobs... and therefore we think we need to have some check stops in place so that our children and grandchildren can have a better life for which we moved here in the first place.”

When Anand referenced moving to Alberta three decades ago, she failed to note a certain irony. She was describing her own immigrant experience at about the same time that Dianne Mirosh was fomenting hatred toward immigrants like Anand and her family.

Now it was Anand given a public platform to disparage “these immigrants.”

‘Cheap tactic,’ says scholar

Audrey Macklin is an immigration scholar at the University of Toronto faculty of law, where she is also the Rebecca Cook chair in human rights law.

Populist politicians in Canada have used immigration, and established immigrants willing to criticize new immigrants, as a tool of deflection for more than 100 years, she said.

“Anti-immigration is always a cheap and available tactic for populist governments,” said Macklin, who was born and raised in Edmonton and took her first degree at the University of Alberta.

“It is an easy way to blame some other people for the challenges that are faced at any given moment,” she added, but particularly when a government is facing financial challenges due to such variables as the structural changes in the global economy.

Because of declining oil prices and the fallout from the Donald Trump regime’s capricious tariffs, Alberta’s projected deficit for the fiscal year ending next spring is expected to be $6.5 billion, a massive swing from an $8.3 billion surplus in the previous year.

“It is hard to know who to blame, but if you can embody it in immigrants, then you have somebody who people can grasp as a target, as a kind of cause of their hardship.”

A favoured tactic of populist politicians when targeting immigrants is to get an established immigrant to criticize the more recent arrivals. The established immigrants invariably talk about how hard-working they were, how they didn’t ask for or receive anything from the government and how they strove to fit in.

“Of course, the difficulty with that is that what they are saying about new immigrants is exactly what was said about them,” Macklin said.

“When one starts complaining about immigrants, they think it shows how well they fit in. I'm inclined to think that it is a sign of fragility; that the people who were once immigrants themselves try to make themselves more accepted and more acceptable by complaining about the new immigrants.”

Anand did not respond to interview requests.

Town hall attendees shown anti-immigrant video

During the open-microphone section of the panel, a Red Deer citizen named Mark asked, “Why is it that the immigrants that are coming in now make $6,500 a month when I can't even make that kind of money myself?”

Ukrainian people are “working their butts off,” Mark said, but “these other people are allowed to come and take from social services.” His wife, he said, could not get Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, but “they play the race card and get it scot-free. It’s not fair.”

Smith fielded the question with no pushback.

Before Mark was provided a YouTube-streamed platform to vent, the panel played a video about immigration, as it did at every town hall.

The video directly blames immigrants for high housing costs and unemployment rates. At 8.4 per cent, Alberta now has the second-highest unemployment rate in Canada.

“Many of the divisions and disputes that plague other countries are now making their way into ours,” the video’s narrator says.

The panel launched six surveys on its website. One is about immigration. Before taking the survey, a participant is required to watch a video.

“If Alberta is not satisfied with the number or economic qualifications of newcomers moving to our province, we may have the option to withhold provincial social programs to any non-citizen or non-permanent resident who does not have an Alberta-approved immigration status,” the video states.

In a statement to the Canadian Press, Smith’s press secretary said the number of newcomers entering Canada must be sustainable, but he also trotted out some well-used tropes about immigrants.

"Everyone wanting to come should be committed to upholding the Canadian values of hard work, love of freedom and peaceful coexistence," he said.

"[Former prime minister] Justin Trudeau's Liberals upended Canada's immigration system for over a decade by instituting essentially an open borders policy that permitted millions annually to enter Canada, often without any sort of proper vetting, job prospects or needed employment skills.

"The results have been disastrous. Housing prices have skyrocketed, and unemployment keeps increasing as immigration outpaces job growth."

Macklin said the Smith government’s complaints about immigrants typify the “kind of consistent drumbeat of complaints” that people have made about newcomers for generations.

“Either they are stealing our jobs or if they are not stealing our jobs, then they are sucking the welfare state dry.

“And if neither of those things can be advanced, then they are in some important way not integrating, not assimilating, or they pose a moral or cultural or religious or security threat.”

It started with Chinese immigrants, Macklin said, and then it was Jewish immigrants, Japanese immigrants, “you name it.”

“The villains in the piece change over time, but the narrative is largely the same.”

Unsaid: Immigrants fill dangerous jobs

Macklin noted that none of the panellists, including Smith, who represents the Brooks-Medicine Hat riding, mentioned the hundreds of new immigrants who work at the dirty, dangerous jobs in meat-packing plants in Brooks, Calgary and Red Deer that they can’t recruit Albertans to fill.

Newcomer centre staff in Calgary and Edmonton told the Canadian Press there has been an increase in hostility toward immigrants that they link to the debate over immigration. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has called for “very hard caps” on immigration.

“Clients are coming with severe anxiety and sometimes panic attacks after hearing racial slurs outside our door,” Shamaila Akram with the Calgary Centre for Newcomers told the Canadian Press.

“We have instances where they are being harassed while walking in the downtown.”

Kelly Ernst, also with the Centre for Newcomers, directly connected the increased harassment to the Alberta Next panel.

"Since [the] Alberta Next panel raised its ugly head, it has also created additional hostility with some of the comments associated to that," said Ernst, who pointed out that the federal government’s open immigration policy is not the fault of immigrants.

When Smith launched the Alberta Next panel in June, among the online surveys its website offered visitors was one asking whether some social services should be withheld from immigrants to discourage them from coming or staying.

Macklin said there has always been xenophobia and racism and attacks on newcomers, “but what the Alberta government is doing is fomenting it.”

“It is giving licence to people by saying you are right to hate these people.”

The UCP government would insist it is not encouraging violence, Macklin said, “but they are encouraging the kinds of narratives and opinions and providing them with validation that we then see manifested in the most extreme cases of violence.”

“All of this is sad and predictable. It is a shameless tactic, but they think it is politically successful.”

If you have any information for this story, or information for another story, please contact Charles Rusnell in confidence via email.

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