How Alberta fell out of love with mass immigration
A few short years ago, before she had proposed a new set of referendum questions on Thursday aimed at curbing rapid population growth, Premier Danielle Smith was actively courting newcomers to the province. Indeed, with the private sector facing a shortage of skilled workers, the premier could hardly bring in enough people to satisfy her appetite.
Smith’s latest referendum push, then, seems like a dramatic shift in policy. Instead, the premier told reporters on Friday, her change in tone is the result of a stark mismatch between Alberta’s efforts to recruit skilled workers and changes to Canada’s immigration system made under former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
“We were doing a very targeted ask to get skilled workers here,” Smith said on Friday. “But as I said, we had no idea that Justin Trudeau was taking all limits off all those (immigration) programs, because they didn’t ask us, they didn’t tell us. They just did it.”
Under the Trudeau government, Canada’s immigration system shifted away from merit-based approvals and toward ramping up the intake of foreign students, temporary workers and non-permanent residents, with much less emphasis on whether the newcomers could perform specific jobs. That conflicted with Alberta’s efforts to funnel workers into specific areas like tech and petrochemicals, according to Smith.
Her predecessor, Jason Kenney, first launched the “Alberta is Calling” campaign that sought to encourage skilled workers from Vancouver, Toronto and other urban centres to move to Alberta, and even provided them $5,000 to offset moving costs. Smith carried the program forward after becoming premier, with the army of new labourers forming the cornerstone of the province’s economic ambitions.
As recently as January 2024, Smith told Alberta podcaster Shaun Newman that she hoped to see Alberta’s population double by 2050, from almost five million to more than 10 million, driven mainly by newcomers from other provinces but also immigrants from “South Africa, from India, from China” and other nations.
“Everything that we offer is so unique in this country, that we have an obligation to be that bastion of freedom,” she said at the time. “And I think we should welcome the people who want to come here and enjoy it with us.”
Attracting more newcomers to the province wouldn’t just underpin Alberta’s economic growth, Smith said, but it would also serve as a way to deepen the province’s clout within Canada so that it was no longer “treated as a junior partner” within confederation.
A few months later, she was urging then-prime minister Trudeau to double the number of permanent residents Alberta could approve through the Provincial Nominee Program, up to 20,000. Ottawa’s failure to open that stream of immigrants wider was, as Smith said in a letter to Trudeau at the time, “one more example of the federal government interfering in our provincial jurisdiction.”
On Thursday, Smith presented five referendum questions aimed at curbing the soaring numbers of immigrants entering the province. The referendum, to be presented in October 2026, proposes policies that would reduce immigration rates, cut social services to new immigrants, and propose constitutional changes that would give provinces more power over immigration levels, among other things.
“We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Smith said on Friday. The federal government “shouldn’t be able to completely upend 40 years of established policy without talking to anyone about it, especially when the cost falls to the provinces.”
The referendum comes as a wave of migrants from overseas and from other provinces has, according to the premier, pushed Alberta’s education and health-care systems to the brink.
Changes to Canada’s immigration system under Trudeau led to a rapid increase in non-permanent residents, said Smith — a trend that has been “financially crippling” for Alberta in a way that “undercuts the quality of our health care, education and other services.”
Alberta’s overcrowding problem speaks to the long-time struggle that successive governments have faced in attracting skilled labourers versus simply expanding the population with unproductive new residents. Smith had long called for adding more health-care professionals and tradespeople to the province, particularly those in the construction sector that could help ease its housing shortage.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Smith said the effort to bring in specific workers was amplified by a fundamentally unsustainable rise in population through the immigration system.
“I thought we had the tolerance to create jobs, we’ve been a very powerful job creator, but clearly it’s broken,” she told reporters on Friday. “There is a point where you have to look at the reality, and the reality is, you cannot build homes fast enough to accommodate 150,000 people a year coming here.”
Tara Pandes, an immigration lawyer and founder of Calgary-based Odyssey Law, said the struggle to obtain necessary skilled workers is in large part due to the bureaucratic tangle that dramatically slows the hiring process.
“I can tell you from working down in the trenches that some of these programs, which are meant to bring in these workers quickly, don’t operate that way at all,” Pandes said. “The level of bureaucracy and processing times, it’s just crazy in some circumstances.”
While Smith has blamed international migrants for the added strain on public services, migration from other provinces — of the sort that Alberta targeted through the Alberta is Calling campaign — is another contributor to population growth.
According to public data, interprovincial migration into Alberta peaked in the third quarter of 2023 with 16,500 newcomers entering the province. International immigration, meanwhile, peaked at 42,000 in the same quarter, but has since dropped off into the negatives while inter-provincial movement has remained positive, albeit at a much lower rate. As of the third quarter of 2025, inter-provincial migration had dropped off to just over 5,000.
Smith said Friday that while she wants to see the number of temporary residents go down, she still wants Ottawa to increase the number of permanent residents the province can welcome.
“We have a large number of individuals who are seeking Provincial Nominee status,” Smith said. “We need to have the ability to offer permanent resident status to more people, just like they do in Quebec.”
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