Brace yourself this year for some of the worst political discourse Alberta has seen in a long time, because if Danielle Smith is going to succeed at the project she announced yesterday, she’s going to have to convince us of two big lies about immigration—one that’s very simple, and one that’s a bit complex.

Addressing the province on television and online, Premier Smith announced yesterday that the province is adding another referendum to the growing pile. On October 19, voters will get a swing at nine referendum questions, four about sovereignty and five about cracking down on immigration to the province.

The crackdown is necessary, says Smith, because somehow Alberta has got into the position of balancing most of its provincial budget on oil revenue, the price of oil has crashed, and the province has seen a surge of new residents.

By now we’ve already gotten to the first big lie, the simple one. Smith claims that Alberta is struggling to manage a constant surge of migration. You may have recently seen folks supporting that argument by posting graphs like this one:

"Trend of Canadian Immigration" from Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Indeed there is a noticeable increase in Canada’s rate of immigration from 2021 through 2024, with the rise looking especially big next to an equally dramatic pandemic dip in 2020. From 1991 through to 2018, the national immigration rate hovered steadily around 0.8%, according to Statistics Canada. But from 2021 through 2024, that rate ranged from 1.06% to 1.18%.

But this chart is missing some very important information. What it most obviously leaves out are 2025 and 2026, and in 2025 the immigration rate was already receding. Danielle Smith doesn’t really need to ask for an immigration crackdown—Mark Carney’s already doing one.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, migration into the country is already way down since Carney’s election. New student arrivals last December: only 10,000, as opposed to 90,000 in December 2023. Temporary foreign workers: down from 30,000 in December 2023 to only 10,000 last December. 

And the federal Liberals, working hard to court conservative voters, say they’re going to keep squeezing harder. Non-permanent residents, international students and temporary foreign workers will face restrictions to entering the country until they make up less than 5% of the population here, says federal minister Lena Diab. According to the feds, Canada’s rate of immigration is already back under 1% and heading towards the same levels as the Harper years.

But the fib about Alberta being blasted with migrants is even more clear if you look not at the federal data, but our own.

Here’s an Alberta view from the province’s economic dashboard portal—these are the Smith government’s own numbers.

Screencap from the Alberta Economic Dashboard, taken February 20, 2026

Alberta isn’t being hit with a constant surge of migration—Alberta did receive a surge of migration and it’s already over. Migration into the province peaked in August 2023 and has been declining ever since.

And a bit more context: migration probably peaked in 2023 because we asked people to move here. A year before the peak, Alberta launched a nationwide multi-million dollar ad campaign, ‘Alberta Is Calling,’ urging residents across the country to come join us. To this day, Alberta is still offering a $5000 Alberta Is Calling Moving Bonus to draw people in.

As recently as 2024, Smith was writing to the feds asking for 30,000 more people through the Provincial Nominee Program. Though perhaps there’s some difference between the migration she asked for and the migration we got—the Premier asked for 10,000 Ukrainians, specifically. Perhaps only looking for folks with that “Socratic Judeo Christian” ethic she was posting about this week, and not, as executive director at the Premier’s office Bruce McAllister put it online, people from “nations with failed systems.”

This remarkably racist screed from Bruce McAllister, executive director of the Premier's office, is the sort of thing we're about to hear all year. Screencapped from McAllister's Twitter feed on February 20, 2026

So the claim that Alberta is buckling under a continuing surge of immigration: that’s the big, simple lie, and one that’s fairly easy to point out with a single Albertan chart. But I promised you two, so let’s get to the more complex one.

The simple fact—one that few politicians in the current environment have the spine to stand up and say, and one that I’m sure is about to turn more than a few readers off right here—is that immigration is very good for this country.

It’s not just good in some nebulous moral sense, though it is indeed moral to allow folks to migrate here, especially from parts of the world being presently wrecked by climate change that we have a hand in. It’s also just good in the cynical, material, all-of-our pocket-books sense.

Like most advanced industrial nations, Canada simply doesn’t produce a lot of babies. According to Statistics Canada, through the 2000s, nearly 90% of Canada’s population growth has come from migration, not birth.

That’s a real problem as our population ages. As the ratio of retirees to workers continues to rise, we need more and more people of working age to pick up the slack. Business owners may beg for low labour prices and temporary foreign workers they can abuse, but the rest of us really do need new workers in our communities too—not just nurses, doctors, and care workers to directly care for us but others of all sorts whose income taxes will keep our social programs and benefits afloat.

Maybe Naheed Nenshi’s NDP will find its courage, toss out the polls, and start arguing for what's true. But we can be certain that the province’s right-radical populist movement will show up in force to argue for what isn’t. The UCP cheerleaders over at the Western Standard, a publication we do not link out to as a matter of policy here, are already arguing that Canada needs its own ICE, and despite the obscene state violence from ICE that we are seeing across the border today, the rallying cry of the Canadian right is becoming "remigration now!"

Expect the discourse to be lousy this year, my friends. Because Danielle Smith isn’t going to just be trying to convince you that immigration is bad—she’s going to have to convince you that you can’t read a damn chart. And as the lies keep piling up, this campaign is going to get nasty.