This is the second part of a multi-part series leading up to the October 19 Alberta Referenda.
I arrived in this country as an adolescent, with two languages to learn in a new country and a revolution behind me in the old one. Canada asked nothing of me except what any country, new or old, tacitly asks of everyone: that we make ourselves useful. I have lived in Alberta for over 30 years, and this is my home. So, I take a particular interest in being told that the immigration questions on the upcoming October ballot appeal to people, many of whom are good friends of mine, who would rather I had stayed where I was.
Duane Bratt, a former colleague during my teaching days at MRC, has written a somewhat careful case against those questions. He goes through the questions in order, explains his reasoning on each, and lands on a No. He also opposes separation and says so plainly. All that is good. Anyone arguing either side of this referendum should want quality opponents because a case tested against a serious critic survives contact with the public. A case tested against a caricature never does.
However, Bratt writes that the immigration questions appeal to a racist fringe, and that within Alberta separatism “there is a clear racist element.” I will answer that first because a charge like that does not sit alongside the policy argument. It replaces it.
What is more, racism has become such a facile slur that it almost makes no sense. This is especially true when no racial elements are involved. In the Orwellian postmodern paradigm in which so many live, it is no coincidence that the folks who readily qualify other people as “racialized” here and “racialized” there are the most frequent users of the “racist” accusation. It has become a go-to word for those with no arguments, which is why it is somewhat sad to see Duane resort to it.
What the questions say
Read the five questions and look for the words that would carry the charge. Origin appears nowhere. Race appears nowhere. Religion, language, colour, creed: none of those markers that progressives typically assign to “race” appear in any of the five. Instead, the questions use categories of legal status that federal immigration law, which is to say the Parliament of Canada, created and uses daily: citizens, permanent residents, holders of work permits, holders of study permits, asylum claimants.
Bratt knows this, and his argument does not claim otherwise. His claim runs to motive: the questions solve problems that do not exist; therefore, their purpose lies elsewhere, and the elsewhere is scapegoating. The reasoning has an elegant shape and a serious flaw. Any policy a critic judges unnecessary can be assigned a hidden motive by the same method, and no evidence can dislodge the assignment because the absence of racial language in the text becomes proof of the coding rather than proof of its absence. A charge that cannot fail cannot inform. The beauty of some of the weakest thinking we see today lies in the argument that evidence of a nefarious conspiracy is the lack of evidence for it.
Alberta has ugliness, as every society does. Who can forget the infamous Jim Keegstra, vigorously defended by the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA)?
Some people voting Yes in October will vote Yes for reasons I might find contemptible, if I knew every person’s reasons, which I do not. No one can. The same holds for every side of every question ever put to a population. What Bratt owes the argument, and has not supplied, is evidence that this element drives the policy rather than merely stating it.
Consider the province he is describing. Calgary elected Naheed Nenshi, the first Muslim mayor of a major North American city, and then elected Jyoti Gondek, born in Britain to a Punjabi family. Edmonton elected Amarjeet Sohi, born in rural Punjab. For four years Alberta’s two largest cities were led at the same time by mayors of South Asian heritage. Montreal and Quebec City are still waiting to do it once. A racist electorate is remarkably bad at this. The only time that I have been to FortMac, I counted easily about 20 different languages spoken by people walking by at the airport. My church is bursting at the seams with Nigerians and Filipinos. I could go on.
The memory runs deeper than the mayors. John Ware crossed into the District of Alberta in 1882 at the back of a cattle drive, born into slavery in the American South and freed by a war he had no hand in starting. He worked the Bar U and the Quorn, registered his own brand in 1885, homesteaded at Millarville, and built one of the district's first irrigation systems. Ottawa’s immigration policy in those decades worked to keep Black settlers out of the West. The neighbours took a different view, and when Ware died under his horse in September 1905, his funeral was said to be the largest Calgary had yet seen.
Alberta later named a mountain, a creek, and a school after him. The cabin he built in his homestead has been sitting on display, restored, at Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park for decades. Parks Canada finally made him a national historic person in 2022, and the plaque at the Bar U says he built that life despite racism and frontier conditions and having been enslaved, which is the honest way to put it. A place reveals itself in whom it chooses to remember and whom it erases.
Claiming one knows someone’s motives is always difficult to sustain intellectually, and a professor of Duane’s experience knows this, but does it anyway. It is an illegitimate case to make, and it is always illegitimate to assign dark motives to people in the opposite camp to the one that one has chosen. The baseless claim that one knows the motives of those in the wrong opens one to ridicule, if not contempt, for one’s credibility as a person and, worse, as an academician.
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The Charter argument, examined
Bratt makes a second claim that can be tested against a document rather than against motives. He writes that the immigration questions violate mobility rights under the Charter.
Section 6 answers this directly, and the answer runs against him twice.
Subsection 6(2) grants Canadian citizens and permanent residents the right to move to any province and pursue a livelihood there. Holders of work permits and study permits hold no such right, and asylum claimants hold no such right, because the section does not extend to them. The courts have taken the same view. A foreign national who accepted a five-year commitment to practise medicine in one province as a condition of his work permit was later held to have waived any section 6 claim, precisely because the right had never attached to him before he obtained permanent residence. Questions 2, 3 and 4 address exactly the categories outside the section and expressly preserve the position of citizens and permanent residents. Whatever else may be said against them, they do not engage section 6.
Then comes subsection 6(3)(b), which subjects even the rights of citizens and permanent residents to any law providing for reasonable residency requirements as a qualification for receiving publicly provided social services. The framers of the Charter contemplated waiting periods for social programs and included that permission in the text. Question 3 proposes a twelve-month wait for people who hold no section 6 rights at all, which places it further inside the constitutional line rather than outside it. When I arrived in Alberta from Quebec, I had to wait three months to access health services. The same applied when I moved to Nova Scotia.
None of that makes the question unwise. Constitutional permission and good policy are different things, and the twelve-month figure invites a real objection under the Canada Health Act, which allows provinces to impose a residency wait of no more than three months for insured health services. That objection has some force. The mobility-rights objection does not, and a professor of policy studies would want to know which of his arguments carries weight before the campaign tests them.
The scale of the thing
Bratt asks who exactly is being excluded, and answers that the categories are small. On people whose visas have expired, he is right, and the number is modest. On the population the questions address he is not.
Alberta’s own Office of Statistics and Information counted 292,462 non-permanent residents living in this province on 1 July 2025. Work permit holders made up 59.3 per cent of them, study permit holders 16.8 per cent, people holding both 7.4 per cent, family members another 6.9 per cent, with asylum claimants making up the rest. That is a population larger than Red Deer and Lethbridge and Medicine Hat combined, arriving inside roughly three years, into schools and clinics and rental markets that were built for the province we had before.
Nobody in Alberta chose that number. Ottawa set it, and Ottawa has since reversed it, cutting the national non-permanent resident population by close to half a million in fifteen months, which is itself an admission that the earlier number was wrong. A province that absorbs a swing of that magnitude in either direction, without a say in either, has a jurisdictional complaint rather than a racial one.
The letter Bratt raises, and what it shows
He points out that Smith wrote to Trudeau in 2024 asking for more immigrants and asks how that squares with asking for fewer now. The question is fair, and the letter answers it.
On 27 March 2024, Smith asked Ottawa to double Alberta’s Provincial Nominee Program allocation from 9,750 to 20,000, and to add 10,000 places for Ukrainian evacuees. The Provincial Nominee Program is the stream Alberta selects. She was asking for more of the immigration this province chooses, while Ottawa was running federal streams the province does not choose at volumes the province was never consulted about. Her letter says as much, calling the allocation decision one more instance of federal interference in provincial jurisdiction.
Wanting more of what you select while objecting to the volume of what is sent to you states the autonomist position rather than contradicting it. Quebec has held that position since 1991, selects its own economic immigrants under the Canada-Quebec Accord, and nobody calls that arrangement a racist element in Quebec society. No one credible, anyway.
Where Bratt is right
Question 1 is badly built. That’s a fair comment, and there is some evidence for it. It bundles four separate propositions into a single yes-or-no question, and a voter who wants a Quebec-style selection agreement but dislikes the employment-priority clause has no way to say so. Bratt is right that “sustainable levels” carries no number, and right that a voter is entitled to ask what number the government has in mind before authorizing it.
The employment-priority clause is the genuine legal exposure in the whole set. Question 1 asks whether the government should take increased control over immigration to reduce it to more sustainable levels, prioritize economic migration, and ensure Albertans have “first priority to new employment opportunities.” Read that last clause beside subsection 6(2)(b), which protects the pursuit of a livelihood in any province, and which the Supreme Court has held does not depend on residence in the province where the livelihood is pursued.
A rule preferring Albertans for new jobs reaches past non-citizens and might touch Canadians from Saskatchewan and Manitoba, who hold the right in full. Alberta could not shelter such a law behind the notwithstanding clause either, since section 33 does not reach section 6. The rest of the immigration objection is weaker than this part.
Questions 2, 3 and 4 do sit awkwardly together, and a voter could reasonably read them as three answers to the same problem. And Bratt’s hardest case is the children. A province that funds schooling for the child of a temporary worker who pays Alberta taxes, and then bills that family for it, should be able to explain itself in a sentence a decent person would accept. The same can be said for childless Canadians whose property taxes help pay for schools for entire lifetimes.
Those are arguments about drafting, cost and administration. Every one of them can be made, and should be made, without a word about race.
What is being asked
The thread running through the five questions, and through the four constitutional ones behind them, is standing. I see nothing untoward in it. Alberta is asking to occupy space the Constitution already assigns to provinces. Section 95 makes immigration a concurrent jurisdiction, which means this province may legislate in the field today, subject to federal paramountcy where the two collide. Quebec has exercised that standing for over thirty-five years. Alberta is asking for the same, only to be told what its motives must be. This is the “asymmetry” that some Albertans rightly despise. I do.
A serious international literature on managed, orderly immigration exists that Canadians would benefit from reading, and Denmark and Sweden have both run the experiment in ways that ought to inform us. That belongs in its own piece, and I will come back to it in the next couple of weeks.
For now the narrower point stands. Bratt has partially written an argument, and I will engage it rather than dismiss it. The charge appended to it is a different kind of thing, and it does push what argument cannot: it places a question beyond discussion from the start and makes everyone asking it or agreeing to ask it beyond respectability. It is a recognizable tactic, unimpressively employed by people with nothing on their pitch.
I have been an Albertan longer than I was anything else. When I read those five questions, I find control, sustainability, eligibility and cost. I invite anyone who finds something else in them to point at the exact offending line. Innuendo and baseless slurs are not sufficient warrant.
I continue to be impressed by your calm and thoughtful reasoning, Sir. Very well done!
Well done Marco.
Den Modry