Western Standard - Why Alberta is asking voters about immigration

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.

Western Standard - February 27, 2026