Alberta’s referendum last week was really ten referendums. The one everyone watched was the question about leaving Canada, which went about 77–23 for staying. The other nine were Premier Danielle Smith’s idea of what Alberta should get instead of leaving. Her United Conservative government campaigned for “yes” on all nine and spent $4 million on advertising to make the case. Albertans gave her five of them and turned down four.
As CBC News reported, all five immigration questions passed and all four constitutional questions failed. Elections Alberta said in a Sunday afternoon statement that it had finished counting Saturday night. That was about three days later than it had aimed for, since it was trying to publish results within the 48-hour deadline in Alberta’s referendum regulations. It was also the first provincial vote since the province banned vote tabulators, so the agency hand-counted 20,574,612 ballots, which it says is the most ever counted by hand at any Canadian electoral event. Some quick arithmetic: if every voter got a ballot for each of the ten questions, that works out to roughly two million voters. The official results, turnout included, come out on Oct. 29.
The yes side
The most popular question was Question 5, which asks for proof of citizenship to vote in provincial elections. It got 58 per cent. About 55 per cent backed Alberta taking more control of immigration from Ottawa, partly to bring in fewer newcomers. The three questions about restricting public and social services for some non-permanent residents got 52.6, 53 and 52 per cent.
That’s a pass on everything. But on the services questions, a few points out of every hundred voters were all that separated a mandate from a rejection. Here’s what passed. If all five become law, Alberta could make some temporary residents, such as international students and temporary foreign workers, live in the province for at least 12 months before they qualify for some provincial supports like childcare subsidies. It could also charge them a “reasonable fee or premium” for public health care and education. The ballot never set a number, and CBC’s guide to the questions says the province would set the amount after the vote. Smith has floated $1,900 for health care, comparable to what the United Kingdom charges.
While results were still coming in on Wednesday, Smith said her priority would be changing Alberta’s approach to economic migrants. On everything else she would “proceed with caution”:
I think that people who came here and had certain expectations under one set of rules, it’s always very difficult if you change things midstream. So I want to be very cautious about that and try to interpret a little bit of the result that we got back.
I like “interpret a little bit of the result.” You hold a referendum to get a clear instruction from voters. They give you 52 per cent, and now the instruction needs interpreting. And the interpreting will be done by the person who wrote the questions and paid for the ads. A thin yes like this works less like an order and more like an option: the government may act on it and doesn’t have to. Smith can use it on economic migrants, where she wants to move, and leave the rest alone. A narrow win doesn’t bind her, which arguably makes it more useful to her than a landslide.
Lori Williams, a political scientist at Mount Royal University, doesn’t think it’s what Smith wanted. “It doesn’t give her the mandate she wanted,” Williams said. “It doesn’t give her the authority to move forward and sort of detract from the issues that were raised by separatists because we have this very close division on all of the questions.”
The no side
The four constitutional questions were about Alberta choosing its own judges for certain courts, abolishing the federal Senate, opting out of some federal programs, and letting provincial law override federal law in some areas where they conflict. All four failed. The results moved around during the count: when the Globe and Mail reported on partial returns, its headline said Albertans were “split on constitutional questions.” On CBC’s final tally, they lost.
The losses may not change much, because a yes would not have done much either. A Canadian province can’t amend the Constitution by itself, and the constitutional questions needed other governments to agree. Gerard Kennedy, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Alberta, said getting the public interested in constitutional amendment has always been hard. On judges, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Ontario also want to pick their own, but Kennedy put the chances of a constitutional amendment at “very, very low.” His more realistic version: “What we could have is agreements from the federal government to change the system to give the provinces more of a weight, but it will ultimately be the decision of the federal government to decide whom to appoint.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney took the same view on Tuesday from the federal side. “Constitutional change is difficult, it’s long,” he said, and on immigration and “sustainable immigration” he believes “we can accomplish that without constitutional change.” Put another way, the questions that passed are ones Ottawa thinks it can deal with by negotiating, and the ones that failed would have needed a constitutional process that probably wasn’t going anywhere.
The map
The questions did worse in Calgary and Edmonton. Smith told The Calgary Eyeopener’s Loren McGinnis that conservatives across the country need to work out how to appeal to urban voters. “The bread and butter conservative issues that matter in rural Alberta are just different than the ones that matter in urban centres,” she said.
Most of the outside campaigning focused on separation. On the federalist side, the most memorable slogan for the other nine questions was “No to the Nine,” which came from signs put up by strategist Stephen Carter’s campaign, Alberta’s Voice. Carter called his campaign a success but said the immigration results were “a significant blow.” “Immigrants come to Alberta to do two things: create jobs and do jobs,” he said. On the other side, the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project told its supporters to “decline” to answer the nine, saying it “would not lend its name to bogus referendum questions.”
Voters split the same way. Camille Katigbak, a Calgary marketing-agency owner whose parents immigrated from the Philippines, voted yes because she worries about too much pressure on public services: “We have to think about helping others, but at what cost, right?” Dozie Anyaegbunam, who came to Canada from Nigeria in 2021 and hosts The Newcomers podcast, had wanted the questions to fail. He took some comfort from the margin anyway. “Even if the government says they have a mandate, they don’t have a full mandate,” he said.
So both of them read the same 52 per cent and got a different answer out of it, which is also what the premier plans to do.