Albertans Voted to Scapegoat Immigrants. What Happens Next?

As the dust settles on the Alberta referendum, many Canadians have been struggling to parse through a mix of emotions.

There’s relief. As expected, voters overwhelmingly chose to remain in Canada, landing what should be a lethal blow to a separatist movement that for too long has embroiled the province in conflict and chaos.

There’s exhaustion. A desire to move on, to talk about something different, to rehabilitate the reputation of a province that’s provided more than enough fodder and spectacle for the national and international press.

And then there’s disappointment — anger, even — at the results of the other nine questions posed by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith on referendum day.

Though voters rejected all four of Smith’s questions about constitutional reform, all five questions about immigration are passing by what looks to be a slim but comfortable margin.

At the time of this writing, not all referendum ballots have been counted.

But preliminary results show a division in voting patterns between major cities and rural parts of the province, with voters in Calgary and Edmonton saying no to immigration questions while those in rural areas support them.

Ballot counts so far suggest that more than half of Albertans voted in favour of reducing immigration, prioritizing economic migrants and stripping non-permanent residents of access to publicly funded services such as health care and education.

A cynical tactic, but no reason for defeat

For months, experts and advocates had warned that Smith’s immigration questions were little more than a cynical ploy to scapegoat immigrants for the province’s economic woes.

Riddled with confusing, vague and misleading language, they were designed to manipulate voters into supporting policy “solutions” that have no basis in evidence.

The ploy seems to have worked. Before the final results had even been tallied, Smith declared that she had secured a “clear mandate” to pursue immigration reforms, even if it remains unclear how (or if) this would be possible.

But Albertans should not wallow in defeat.

Smith’s “mandate” is bogus — its supposed legitimacy depends on a non-binding referendum that is widely viewed as unfair and undemocratic.

What happened on referendum day was less an exercise of direct democracy than of government manipulation.

As the spectacle dies down and reporters from across the country head home, it is imperative that Albertans repudiate Smith’s supposed mandate and reject the baseless claims and racist assumptions that underlie her party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Rather than self-flagellate, it’s time for Albertans to rise up and demand a different path.

Deflecting blame in a time of upheaval

Of course, rising anti-immigrant rhetoric is not unique to Alberta.

Across the western world, the narrative that foreigners are flooding into our countries, taking away our jobs and overwhelming our schools and hospitals is a core tenet of right-wing political movements.

It is the narrative that drives the “Make America Great Again” movement and the hyper-militarization of border control in the United States. It has fuelled the rising influence of right-wing populism in Europe and sits at the centre of Alberta’s independence movement.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric is rooted in genuine social and economic anxieties about the future, said Esra Ari, a sociology professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

“When people face grievances like rising living costs and strained social services, they often scapegoat ‘others’ to make sense of their struggles,” she said. “In this context, those ‘others’ are racialized immigrants, who are viewed as non-native outsiders.”

It’s a narrative that becomes particularly dangerous, Ari explained, when anti-immigrant rhetoric is “actively sanctioned and manufactured” by elected leaders in order “to consolidate political power and divert public attention from a government’s policy failures.”

Immigrants, in other words, become an easy target for political exploitation, a group that can be used to deflect blame in times of crisis or economic upheaval.

We saw this in recent weeks in France, where hundreds of thousands of students, teachers and parents took to the streets to protest decaying infrastructure and staff shortages in schools.

Right-wing politicians in Europe and North America sought to blame the unrest on mass immigration, rather than austerity, falsely claiming that the riots were spurred by foreigners and “Islamists” with “hatred in their hearts.”

For decades, Canadians were broadly supportive of immigration, recognizing migrants as an essential part of economic growth and a valued part of our social fabric.

More recently, however, attitudes have shifted, even as immigration levels have been significantly reduced.

Today, a majority of Canadians believe that the government is accepting too many immigrants, and nearly two-thirds believe that non-permanent residents should be denied access to some publicly funded programs.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become darker and more sinister. Discrimination against South Asian and Muslim immigrants in particular has become far more normalized, while racist conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” continue to circulate on the fringes.

For the most part, mainstream Canadian leaders have stayed quiet about these shifting attitudes. This silence has had the effect of providing tacit support for the idea that immigration is to blame for the country’s problems.

“This is part of what sociologists call ‘new racism,’” Ari said, “where instead of using overt racist language, there is a reliance on elusive language, coded rhetoric or silence that legitimizes discrimination without accepting accountability.”

In Alberta, this created an opportunity that was too juicy to pass up.

Danielle Smith’s gamble

Canadian writer and activist Harsha Walia recently wrote that referendums have been used by the far right in recent years to normalize white nationalism and move once fringe ideas into the mainstream.

Walia points to Brexit as the most prominent example, arguing that the United Kingdom’s exit from Europe, which was driven in part by xenophobia, laid the groundwork for far-right growth on the continent.

“While the Alberta separatist movement has a different tenor than Brexit,” she wrote in the Breach on Oct. 13, “the undercurrents are frighteningly similar.”

Just a few years ago, the Alberta government under Smith was actively courting immigrants.

In 2024, Smith criticized then-prime minister Justin Trudeau for placing limits on immigration, saying the move would undercut Alberta’s ability to fill jobs and grow the economy.

Earlier this year, Smith suddenly changed her tune. In a televised speech outlining the province's fiscal challenges on Feb. 19, she stated, without evidence, that immigrants have “flooded our classrooms, emergency rooms and social support systems.”

Hypocrisy aside, it’s a narrative that quickly falls apart under scrutiny. Non-permanent residents pay taxes and contribute to government revenue just like anyone else.

If social services are strained, that stems from the government’s failure to adequately fund them.

Whether Smith’s turn against immigration was an attempt to placate the rising influence of the separatist movement among her base or simply a cynical power play, it paved the way for what would become a very expensive attempt to turn Albertans against newcomers and other vulnerable populations.

Or, to use Ari’s language, an attempt to sanction and manufacture anti-immigrant rhetoric to consolidate political power.

Written by the United Conservative Party, the five immigration questions on the referendum ballot were not confusing but manipulatively marketed to voters.

Typically, political parties and third-party advertisers are restricted in how much they can spend in the lead-up to an election or a referendum.

However, in the lead-up to the Alberta referendum, Smith and the UCP passed a bill removing restrictions on government advertising for stand-alone referendums — that is, referendums that are unattached to a broader election.

Critics say this legislation effectively created a loophole that gives Smith and the UCP free range to spend whatever they want to push their agenda forward.

In September, the government launched a $4-million advertising campaign urging Albertans to vote “yes” to the nine referendum questions on immigration and the Constitution, while third-party advertisers are capped at a much lower spending limit.

For Mount Royal’s Ari, the project was undemocratic and “deeply flawed.”

“By framing these measures as the legitimate will of the majority,” she said, “implementing these so-called ‘solutions’ will turn anti-immigrant prejudice into institutionalized racism.”

Early referendum results a sign of the UCP’s ‘weakness’

Zain Velji is a political strategist and organizer who worked to defeat Smith’s referendum questions. Though the “No to the Nine” campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, Velji does not believe that Albertans should be disappointed in the result.

He sees the results as a sign of Smith and the UCP’s “weakness.”

“I’m not willing to throw my fellow citizens under the bus or accuse them of being racist,” he said. He believes that many voters may have been confused or manipulated by the questions.

“This was an attempt to fool people, because Smith’s position wasn’t strong enough. She torqued the wording and spent $4 million on advertising, and barely got 55 per cent support on the immigration questions and lost all the constitutional ones.”

Velji points out that polling from earlier in the year suggested that the immigration questions were likely to be supported by a much larger portion of Albertans. It’s thanks to organizers and campaigners, many of which operated on a shoestring budget, that those numbers shifted.

“As people learned what was going on in terms of either process or the materiality of the questions, they lost 20 to 30 points in public opinion,” he said. “Smith thought she was going to get a slam-dunk mandate, and all she got was jump balls.”

The other danger, of course, is that the results of the referendum will embolden anti-immigrant rhetoric, or inspire other politicians to follow suit.

A day after the referendum, federal Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner said that “Liberal mass immigration” has contributed to depressed wages, high rents and massive health-care wait times, and pledged to remove non-citizens from the country.

And on Thursday, federal Conservatives called on the government to cut permanent residency admissions.

If Canadians want to reverse the tides, we must demand that our leaders stand up for newcomers, and reject the baseless claims and racist assumptions that underlie the anti-immigrant rhetoric that is rapidly spreading across the country and the globe.

“We need political leadership that publicly acknowledges the strengths and immense contributions that immigrants bring to Canada,” said Ari.

She added that Canada needs leadership that “humanizes immigrants by recognizing that they are not mere economic tools — they are human beings who, just like anyone else, need access to health care, education, housing and social services.”

If meaning-making is an important part of political change, then let us not treat the results of the Alberta referendum as a moment of shame.

Consider it a wake-up call. And an opportunity to change course.