Western Standard - February 27, 2026


Why Alberta is asking voters about immigration

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau
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Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

182.92

Word count

297

Sentence count

16


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with Alberta s new premier, Rachel Notley, to talk about her plans for a referendum on immigration and curbing immigration in Alberta, and why she doesn't just want to implement them as policy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You know, you and I both came from kind of the wild rose, direct democracy tradition.
00:00:06.140 I'm a fan of a lot of these kinds of things.
00:00:09.620 But I was mildly critical of this, not in terms of the policies you're proposing for these referenda, but why you wouldn't just do it.
00:00:21.460 I think that there's a very broad support for the measures you're talking about, requiring identification, proof of citizenship to vote.
00:00:28.000 Alberta taking control of immigration, limiting migration, I think these things have broad
00:00:33.400 support in Alberta, even Canada more broadly. Why is it you feel the need to put these items
00:00:40.940 in particular to referendums rather than just implement them as policy?
00:00:46.120 Well, there's a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that it's a change of direction
00:00:49.760 from where we were in 2022 when we did go to the people to seek a new mandate. Because you have
00:00:57.000 remember back in 2022, we were just coming out of COVID and our unemployment rate was 4.9%.
00:01:03.000 We had major big projects on the horizon and we were concerned we weren't going to be able to
00:01:06.680 attract the skilled workers in order to fill the jobs. And so that's when the Alberta is calling
00:01:11.160 campaign started. But what we didn't know is that Justin Trudeau was going to take all of
00:01:15.560 the restrictions off all of the programs over the intervening few years. And as a result,
00:01:20.920 600,000 newcomers came into Alberta in that time. And so what we're asking is a question that Justin
00:01:27.400 Trudeau should have asked. Justin Trudeau never asked anyone whether or not they wanted him to
00:01:31.960 change the policy. What we're asking is, do you want to go back to the kind of immigration policy
00:01:36.520 that we had before.