Alberta Maxxing
Danielle Smith could learn something from the terminally online
The Immigration Questions
Does Alberta have a problem with immigration or Non-Permanent Residents? Danielle Smith and her government seem to think so. She recently announced 9 referendum questions for fall 2026. The questions are split into two groups: 5 on immigration and 4 on constitutional reform. Here I will discuss the 5 immigration questions.
Smith argues that high levels of immigration have strained public services. The immigration questions essentially present a series of policy options for addressing perceived excess immigration levels.
The five immigration questions that will appear on the referendum ballot are:
Question 1: Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?
Question 2: Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?
Question 3: Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs?
Question 4: Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the health care and education systems?
Question 5: Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or citizenship card, to vote in an Alberta provincial election?
Breaking Down the Questions
The first question has two implicit components. First, that immigration levels are too high and, by extension, that population growth is too high. The second is a claim about the economic impacts of immigration: that immigrants take jobs away from Albertans.
Questions two through four propose policies that would tax non-permanent residents more to pay for public services or deny them access to those services. The implication is that they are net extractors from the system and that this is unfair. One can debate the moral merits of the fairness claim but, I think we should also ask the basic financial question: do they cost more than they contribute?
The fifth question asks voters to support stronger voter ID requirements. This appears to be a cultural carryover from American politics where voter fraud is a hot political topic. Canadian elections are governed and administered quite differently and the risks are far lower here.
After reading the five questions and thinking through what is trying to be accomplished, I think they are a combination of bad policy solutions and mediocre solutions addressing trivial problems. I don’t see a reasonable case for wasting Albertan’s time and taxpayer dollars on these 5 questions, as I will explain below.
Are there too many Albertans?
Are the population growth levels unsustainable?
Alberta’s population growth has been high, but the greatest increase of the last 5 years was 4.7% which is lower than peak years earlier in the province’s history. The average population growth rate during the 5 year time period of 2020-2025 was only 2.68%. Recently, The federal government reduced immigration and non-permanent resident levels and Canada’s is projected population to decline in 2026. While I don’t think there ever was one, there is no longer anything even remotely resembling a population growth crisis. The population policy challenge of the next two decades will likely be retaining enough population to maintain a large working population and, by extension, a large tax base, in the context of declining global birth rates.
Even supposing that population growth continued at the same rate, 2.68%, for the next 30 years. How big would Alberta be? 11.1 Million is the number I came up with. Would that be a bad thing? Alberta is a big place and likely has the carrying capacity for 20 or 25 million people. A population that large would increase Alberta’s political power within Confederation and create an economic boom in the province. Alberta has grown that fast before - why not again?
More realistically, if we assess the rate at which Alberta will actually grow, the number of Albertans in 2050 is projected to be somewhere between 6.5 and 8 million. I take these numbers with a grain of salt, since population growth has been consistently overestimated in most jurisdictions in recent years. However, even if we accept the high growth scenario as likely - 8 million Albertans would be a good thing.
If the provincial government wants to argue against population growth it should do that directly. Their claims that our current rate of growth and projected growth are unsustainable are clearly false. The concern about “taking Albertan jobs” is not born out by the research.
Population growth is evidence of a successful society that people want to immigrate to and where young people want to and can afford to have children. As someone who married a 5th generation Albertan, I can confidently say: Albertans are great. Lets pump the numbers.
Are Increases in Non-Permanent Residents Causing Population Growth?
As of January 1, 2026, there are 271,024 non-permanent residents living in Alberta. This is in contrast to the 600,000 new Albertans that the government is concerned about.
Within the NPR category, “Work permit holders only” account for the largest share. Nationally, about 51% of all NPRs are strictly work permit holders (excluding those who are primarily students with work side-privileges).
While permanent residents and inter-provincial movers make up the bulk of long-term growth, the NPR population in Alberta saw a massive spike between 2023 and 2025. However, the most recent data from Q1 2026 shows a 3.8% quarterly decline in the number of NPRs in Alberta, reflecting federal policy shifts to cap temporary residency.
There is a reasonable policy discussion to be had about NPR rates during and immediately following the pandemic, however the highly permissive policies that led to those increases have been ended and current migration to Alberta is being driven by internal migration of Canadian citizens, higher Albertan birth rates, and immigration via a less permissive policy framework.
Reducing NPR levels does not need to be a policy goal of a referendum given that it is already happening and our current population growth rate is, if anything, a bit low.
Should Non-Permanent Residents (NPRs) Pay us More Money?
Ballot Questions 2, 3, and 4 focus on restricting or charging for services (health care, education, and social supports) for those without permanent status. The government suggests that providing these services to NPRs costs hundreds of millions of dollars. What about what they contribute?
While the government cites $681 million in costs for services to NPRs, these individuals contribute an estimated $400 million in tax revenue and over $600 million in international student fees. Here is my napkin math (note: I could be very wrong! feedback welcome)
Personal Income Tax ($198M): Calculated by taking the 180,000 NPRs likely to be working and applying an effective provincial tax rate of 4% (8% bracket minus the $22,323 personal exemption) to an estimated average income of $45,000 ($27,500 taxable).
Education Property Tax ($135M): Estimated based on the NPR population’s 5.4% share of the total population, applied against the $2.5 billion the province collects annually through property tax requisitions, as these costs are baked into their monthly rent.
Excise & Consumption Taxes ($81M): Derived from a baseline of $300 per capita across the full 271,024 NPR population to account for fuel taxes (13 cents/L), tobacco, and cannabis duties, reflecting the lack of a provincial sales tax.
The most significant direct financial contribution that NPRs make is through international student fees which accounted for $670 million in revenue in 2023-24. It is likely higher now.
I don’t have a quick way to calculate other contributions. NPRs pay electricity and gas bills which contribute to our infrastructure costs. They pay municipal property taxes as well. NPRs also participate in the local economy so their consumer spending and any economic spill over effects from their work will count as contributions too. The spill over effects could be larger than one might guess since highly educated researchers, high skilled tech workers, and skilled oil and gas workers from abroad will all start in Alberta on work visas and count as NPRs. NPRs help with labour shortages in low-wage and undesirable jobs such as PSWs and child care work. Additional labour supply drives down costs in these areas and saves taxpayers money.
The government claims that NPRs cost slightly over a billion in direct government services. Their numbers are suspect because of how they calculate the child care costs, which account for about a third of the billion dollars. However, even if we take their numbers at face value, my napkin math suggests that NPRs bring in over a billion in direct revenues to the government and public institutions, in addition to several non-trivial economic contributions that I haven’t calculated here. NPRs appear to be a net economic positive for Alberta.
This shouldn’t surprise us for two reasons. First, NPRs are mostly people here on work permits. The way a welfare state, like Canada, works is that the working people pay for the non-working people. We shouldn’t be surprised that temporary foreign workers are net contributors, the worker part being the key. Second, many NPRs are students who pay high tuition rates. We want more international students paying absurdly high tuition rates to fund our university system which creates good jobs for Albertans.
It’s possible we could squeeze more money out of NPRs, but the possible gains are small and we risk reducing the rates of foreign students and skilled foreign professionals who want to come here. With a sufficiently precise system one might be able to pick out only NPRs of low economic value and squeeze them for more money, but I expect the returns would be low and the bureaucratic costs high. One might also have some moral compunctions about differential treatment.
NPRs pay us lots of money. The system is win-win because people working together in a free market economy generate lots of mutually beneficial cooperation. Let’s keep it that way.
Where is the Problem with Voter Fraud?
Ballot Question 5 addresses proof of citizenship at the polls. While proponents argue this protects election integrity, there is currently no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Alberta.
Because Canadian elections use paper ballots and decentralized counting, large-scale fraud is nearly impossible to hide. I don’t think this change will be particularly consequential. I expect the most significant impacts to be slower voting lines in the next couple of elections as everyone gets used to the new ID requirements. It may also lead to some voter suppression, but I am not sure it would be to the specific benefit of either party.
Proponents of these laws are not thinking clearly about what you would need to do to conduct effective voter fraud. In order to impact an election, your voter fraud must be coordinated, targeted, and operating at scale. ID requirements are not how you catch that kind of fraud; instead you do it through statistical audits and targeted investigations. As long as we stick to paper ballots, Canadians remain well-insulated from direct voter fraud. The real challenges facing our democracy are voter participation, low information, and foreign interference.
I hate line ups and I won’t be pleased if I have to spend 30 minutes in line to vote in the next election because someone in the government spends too much time reading American news.
Unintended Consequences
Let’s suppose we agree that reducing immigration and increasing the amounts that NPRs pay into the system are good and important policy goals. What else might happen if we adopted these rules?
Healthcare Inefficiency: Denying primary care access to certain residents doesn’t mean they won’t get sick. It simply pushes them into emergency rooms, where care is more expensive and providers are legally obligated to treat them, often with no way to recover costs. If you want to increase emergency room wait times, denying NPRs access to preventative care is a great way to do it.
Education and Talent: Denying K-12 education to the children of legal temporary workers (like top-tier researchers or specialized physicians) makes Alberta a much less attractive destination for the global talent the province claims to want.
Teenagers at Loose Ends: 14-18 year old boys cause a lot fewer social problems when they are in school, instead of being left to their own devices. I would rather keep everyone’s kids in school, than save a few bucks in taxes.
Refugees and Benefits
One of the policy goals of question 3 is to get refugee claimants off of social assistance programs in Alberta. Refugees who are sponsored by individuals or by the Canadian government are granted residency and would not count as temporary residents under this policy. The policy targets people who have landed in Canada, applied for refugee status, and are awaiting the outcome of their tribunal decision. This process can take some time and they may be unable to find work or not permitted to work during this time. The government wants them off the Alberta social assistance rolls and paid for by the federal government: who are the ones letting them in and taking a long time to process their applications. Fair enough. This is a classic Canadian jurisdictional issue where one level of government pursues a policy that imposes operational costs on another level of government and doesn’t cost the impacts, except on their own books.
However, refugee claimants are only one group of NPRs. This policy would catch students, temporary workers, and some Ukrainian war refugees that are in Alberta on a custom temporary permit. The government should not be taking away services from tax paying workers, contributing students, and Ukrainian war refugees in an attempt to win a jurisdictional funding squabble with Ottawa.
The refugee claimants on social assistance are often not primarily responsible for the situation. The fault lies with the federal government that does not process the applications quickly. If applications were all handled within 4-6 weeks of arrival, the social assistance problem would be trivial. Either residence status would be granted and the claimant would be scoped out of this policy, or they would be returned to their home country. Appeals can drag this out, but that process was recently tightened and applicants do not have an automatic right to stay in Canada during their appeals.
As for the long-term costs and benefits of refugees in the Canadian population, while they do under perform immigrants brought in through other channels, they are, on average, net financial contributors. This is for two simple reasons: they tend to be younger and they tend to get jobs. Young Canadians and working Canadians are net financial contributors in the tax system. While they will eventually get old and consume more resources, they also tend to have children that then become taxpayers. With an aging population, this is a good thing for Canada and Alberta.
There are important moral questions about our society’s obligations to people fleeing war. I have views on that, but I have focused on the economic policy angles in this piece because I think it is not being considered thoroughly.
The policy in question 3 is not an effective mechanism to address the stated problem, which can be addressed by the federal government through improvements to the refugee claimant system. Further, it would make Alberta a less attractive destination for international students who are a source of revenue for our universities and of talent for our economy.
Conclusion
The immigration referendum questions are bad policy and a waste of time. The policy problems they are trying to address are either not problems at all, or are issues that the federal government has already addressed through recent immigration reforms. The likely outcomes of these 5 policies would hurt our ability to attract international students and talented professionals, and be a net negative for Alberta.
Many have written about their moral disagreements with the policy agenda. Alberta’s moral responsibilities to refugees is an interesting moral question, but I think the correct way to vote on these 5 questions is clear, irrespective of your views about how strong those responsibilities are.
Simple reflection and policy analysis show that these five immigration proposals would not be good for Alberta. I will be voting no on all five and I recommend others do too.