Why results of Alberta’s immigration referendum might not mean what voters think

Reasonable assessments. And Sharma correct on tendencious nature of question wording:

…Is this a victory or a defeat for immigrants?

These margins were lower than what had been projected in earlier public polls, especially given Premier Danielle Smith’s campaign to rally for the mandate for change, said Avnish Nanda, a co-founder of Our Alberta Advantage. The group opposes the Alberta government’s immigration-related referendum questions and policies.

Albertans have voted to remain part of Canada in the province’s first-ever referendum on separation. Wondering what the result says about the other nine questions? Curious how the separatist movement will continue? Want to know what it means for the provincial government’s relationship with the rest of the country?

“She sent every Albertan home like a large pamphlet that contained (what) I think were false statements but made the case about why they should vote yes,” said Nanda, who is also an immigration lawyer in Edmonton.

“She won by (a handful of points) on these questions. She should be winning by 25, 30 points. She barely won this. A large portion of Albertans rejected it.”

Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, also sees the result as a “victory” because he said the way the immigration questions were structured and written would lead many respondents to say yes.

“These were slam-dunk-level questions,” he said. “They didn’t get that. It gives me great joy, great optimism that Alberta has been very decisive. At the end of the day, it looks like Albertans are quite reasonable, committed to the Canadian fabric, committed to working with their neighbours, whether newcomers or old, to a future together.”

Can Alberta actually curtail its immigration?

The referendum asked for more control over immigration but Sharma said the question was “disingenuous,” because immigration is exclusively within the jurisdiction of the federal government. Not too long ago, the premier was asking to double the targets of Alberta’s provincial immigration nomination program and was warm to the idea of increased pathways for Ukrainians, he added.

While Smith may hope to wrest as much control over how many people, and who, are let into Alberta as Quebec does in setting its intakes, Sharma said the conditions and circumstances are so different between the two provinces.

“I’ll call it a febrile fever dream that Alberta can get the same position within the constitutional framework as Quebec,” he said. “If you want sovereignty, you need to define and have a culture … oil and gas is not enough for a culture. The starting point for sovereignty would be to define the culture. Alberta is not the same as Quebec. We don’t have this separate language.”

Source: Why results of Alberta’s immigration referendum might not mean what voters think

Carney government says Canada’s immigration is under control. But those in the know highlight what’s going wrong

Some good reads just prior to the levels plan release:

…While Diab has reined in immigration numbers, whether the immigration system is under control is another question altogether.

“A smaller immigration target is not the same thing as a smaller immigration problem,” said Mario Bellissimo, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and policy analyst.

Depending on who you ask, Canada’s immigration system is either more controlled, stable and sustainable than it has been in years — or still very much a work in progress, plagued by persistent backlogs, constantly changing rules and a critical lack of data on the hundreds of thousands of temporary residents already here.

The question now is whether Ottawa can fix the deeper structural problems before Carney opens the tap again.

Nagging backlogs and long processing

“Reducing numbers is comparatively straightforward,” said Bellissimo. “Building a predictable system that matches intake to capacity, deals fairly with people already here, targets genuine economic needs, reunites families, meets humanitarian obligations, uses technology responsibly, enforces the law and provides timely decisions is much harder.”

6 charts showing Canada’s dramatic immigration changes and economic trends, from Trudeau to Carney

Ottawa has struggled to reduce immigration backlogs and address growing processing times despite huge investments in AI and advanced analytics to modernize the system. The Immigration Department’s website shows that there were more than one million pending permanent residence applications in the queue as of the end of July 2026….

Source: Carney government says Canada’s immigration is under control. But those in the know highlight what’s going wrong

Karas: Canada’s mass-immigration era is ending—but high immigration is not

Of note and making some necessary linkages:

…The durable policy lesson is not that Canada should close its doors. It is that admissions must be tied transparently to housing construction, labour market conditions, infrastructure, public services and measurable settlement outcomes. Immigration should complement productivity and domestic workforce development, not conceal their weaknesses.

If that principle survives the next labour shortage and the next political cycle, Canada’s immigration reset will mark a genuine structural change. If governments return to using population growth as the easiest substitute for economic reform, the present retrenchment will prove to have been only a pause, and its benefits may evaporate.

Source: Op-Ed: Canada’s mass-immigration era is ending—but high immigration is not

Her federal role was cut. Now Amira Elghawaby is launching a new tool to force government action on Islamophobia

Will be interesting to see the results and usage over time:

…The Muslim Communities Research Observatory (MCRO) portal, called macro for short, goes live Friday. It will be a global hub, a one-stop shop for advocacy groups who may “not even be aware of what research is out there” and for academics who “struggle with knowledge mobilization.”

“This is about raising the ability to ask for policy changes that are fully rooted in the evidence,” she said.

The site will be an important platform to disseminate a new five-year survey of Muslims in Canada by the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies on social issues, faith and belonging that will also be announced Tuesday.

The last research on Muslim identities was the landmark Environics Survey in 2016, in which a question was, “Do Muslims want to embrace Canadian values or Muslim values?” said lead author Anver Emon. In this survey, researchers did away with that binary and found a majority of Muslims and non-Muslims saying Muslims in Canada want to adopt both Canadian and Muslim values.

It also found that while first-generation Muslim immigrants would overwhelmingly choose to immigrate to Canada again, nearly half (47.5 per cent) of second- and later-generation Canadian Muslims would choose to live in another country over concerns of affordability and inequality. The study reflects the perceptions of 903 Muslim households and 1,072 non-Muslim households across Canada, making it the largest sample of Canadian Muslims surveyed to date, Emon said.

MCRO is an ideal partner for the dissemination of research, said Emon, because, “as academics, we’re not the best at putting our ideas in 30-second sound bites, let’s be honest, right?”

Elghawaby’s experience with government, knowledge of policy and background as a journalist makes her “ideally suited” to translate that knowledge, he said….

Source: Her federal role was cut. Now Amira Elghawaby is launching a new tool to force government action on Islamophobia

Musselman: A covenant, not a grant: Canada’s citizenship process asks too little in return

Odd commentary that suggests the author doesn’t fully understand the current process and requirements. Certainly, the header “asks too little in return” is one that I share but his specific recommendations in many respects are already in place (e.g., there is already a written attestation of the oath, which is of course a binding, albeit unenforced except through abiding by Canadian laws).

And always telling, when a lawyer states changes “cost little,” that they don’t appreciate the operational details and complexities (just as is the case for policy makers occasionally with C-3 being the latest example):

Canada is changing quickly, and the strain shows. Police-reported hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity have risen for six consecutive years, hate crimes targeting religion remain well above their 2020 level, and Canadians’ trust in one another has fallen from 54 per cent in 2013 to under 44 per cent today. These problems have many causes, and naturalization policy is clearly not the primary one. The issue is not immigration itself, but whether the process by which immigrants become citizens asks enough of them, and of us, in return.

Canada’s citizenship process asks immigrants to pass a test, pay a fee, and meet residency requirements. What it does not ask is the one thing that matters most: that they recognize Canada’s constitutional order as binding, conduct themselves within it, and take part in civic life through legitimate channels. That should worry us.

Since 1995, Canada has replaced the citizenship judge — who once interviewed every applicant — with a twenty-question multiple-choice test that can be easily memorized. The oath ceremony now often happens alone on a screen. An immigrant can clear every stage of naturalization without ever being asked to demonstrate that they understand, much less accept, the constitutional order and civic responsibilities of the country they are joining.

That is a mistake, and an avoidable one. Citizenship should be treated as a covenant, not a grant — a mutual bargain, not a gift with no strings attached. Canada offers immigrants membership in one of the world’s most prosperous, stable, rights-respecting societies. In return, it is entitled to ask that they recognize the country’s constitutional order as binding, resolve disagreements through Canada’s own institutions rather than import quarrels from abroad, and take part in civic life through legitimate channels. None of that means policing what anyone believes — only how they act.

Naturalization is the only moment Canada has real leverage to secure that covenant: the one point when an immigrant is actively asking the state for something. Once the oath is sworn, the leverage is gone. Yet Canada’s process checks residency, fees, and test scores — never recognition, conduct, or participation. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has even stopped tracking how many permanent residents goon to become citizens, in favour of measures that only show whether paperwork is moving.

A COVENANT, NOT A GRANT

Canada’s citizenship process asks too little in return. Other countries offer lessons, but none are perfect. The Netherlands built a genuinely substantive citizenship test, but let it fall unfairly on its most vulnerable applicants. Germany keeps its knowledge test modest and does the real work through a signed Declaration of Loyalty to the country’s constitutional order. Britain made its test harder without making it meaningful — a UK parliamentary committee has called it a “bad pub quiz.”

Canada has taken none of these lessons to heart. Ottawa should (my comments in italics):

• Tell applicants, from their very first contact with the citizenship process, what recognition, lawful conduct, and civic participation require — not wait until the oath to explain it. The website focuses on basic eligibility requirements and citizenship process, which then lead to the more substantive issues of rights and responsibilities. Arguably, could have a short intro on the importance and general substance.

• Rewrite the outdated Discover Canada guide around Canada’s constitutional order, not trivia and heritage narratives. Kind of funny reading this as Discover Canada, the 2009 study guide which, with some controversy, dramatically increased such references compared to the earlier guide, A Look at Canada. Is important for the guide not just to be a dry legal text but to capture some of the history and geography that help newcomers understand Canada better. Not all trivia.

• Require a real recognition interview for every applicant, not just the small minority who currently trigger one. Unrealistic, given the annual numbers. The test was introduced in 1995 given the impracticalities and costs of interviewing all applicants at a time when numbers were half compared to the present.

• Restore in-person citizenship ceremonies and rewrite the oath, with a signed declaration, to name what Canada actually requires. Agree on making in-person ceremonies the default (currently about half of all ceremonies). Current wording of oath covers the basics but certainly room for improvement but requires legislation. Applicants sign a written attestation already.

• Make IRCC report to Parliament on whether permanent residents are actually choosing to become citizens — not merely on how fast their applications move. This used to exist but was meaningless as the performance standard was not xx percent within 5-9 years since landing but from any period. Data published during regular census periods which has been informative. Agree should be in annual plan, but focus needs to be on recent immigrants.

Canada naturalized more than 359,000 people in 2024–25 alone. Every one of them passed through a process that never required them to demonstrate an understanding of the responsibilities that come with the Canadian passport they now hold. That moment, once gone, cannot be recovered. The reforms proposed above cost little and could be implemented quickly. What Canada cannot afford is to keep treating citizenship as paperwork to process rather than a covenant worth keeping.

Mark Musselman is a Toronto-based entertainment lawyer and PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.

Source: A covenant, not a grant: Canada’s citizenship process asks too little in return

ICYMI – Chris Selley: Avi Lewis embraces collective guilt for Jews, but never for Muslims

Valid contrast:

…“Indeed, I’m old enough to remember the aftermath of 9/11, when New Democrats — and many others, particularly on the left — admonished us not to do to Muslims precisely what Lewis did to his fellow Jews. (The admonishment was often a bit much, but I fully agreed with the message and still do, no matter what group we’re talking about.)

One very common commentary trope back then was, “Well why can’t Muslims at least apologize for what was done in their name?” It was ugly and un-Canadian, and it rightly got called out. And now, a quarter-century later, Lewis is doing the same thing.

Anyway: By way of follow-up, Lewis bizarrely insisted that he had not held Jews collectively responsible for the wreck of Gaza … which he unambiguously had, including himself among the guilty.  He accused those criticizing him of being “partisan.” Lewis’s fellow travellers insisted, among other things, that Lewis’s critics were acting “in bad faith”— which is, ironically, a very bad-faith argument.

I also have to say I’m intrigued to know what Lewis imagines he or any other Jewish Canadian should have done to stop what he claims is an “ongoing genocide.” Does he have special powers we don’t know about? The anti-Israel rabble isn’t easily placated by empty statements of support and solidary from their politicians. They want Canada to Do Something, or at least be more virulently anti-Israel in its policies and messaging.

“People like Lewis rely on the notion that “criticizing Israel is not the same as criticizing Jews,” which I certainly agree with. But you don’t hear that argument so often nowadays. Protestors seem less and less interested in picking targets that we’re supposed to believe are extra-supportive of Israel. Once you start marching through Jewish-populated neighbourhoods, the argument is laughable. You don’t know who lives there. This is just pure harassment.

Does Lewis realize he’s inviting misery upon himself, for that matter? It’s not hard to imagine the rabble turning on him. They don’t care who he is, or who his father was, or where he sits on the political spectrum. They just want more Canadian politicians to say they hate Israel. And Lewis just made that quit a bit easier.

Source: Chris Selley: Avi Lewis embraces collective guilt for Jews, but never for Muslims

Ottawa announces immigration rule changes that will give highly paid foreign workers an edge

Sensible change:

Highly paid foreign nationals working in Canada – including doctors, engineers and programmers – will now have an advantage when applying for permanent residence.

Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab announced changes to immigration rules Friday that will see applicants to the Express Entry system receive additional points if they have worked for at least a year in a high-wage job in Canada or have a high-paid job offer.

The extra points will increase the chances of skilled foreign nationals, such as academics and people working in high tech, getting an invitation from the Immigration Department to apply for permanent residence.

The move follows calls in recent years from economists to focus immigration on the highly skilled workers that Canada needs to fuel growth and plug labour gaps, rather than large numbers of unskilled workers.

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets, said Friday he agrees that the focus for immigration “should be on high-skilled individuals.”

“But it also needs to focus on skilled labour such as trades where Canada has a chronic shortage,” he said in an e-mail. “If one of the goals of housing policy is to reduce the cost of building, such a move will be in the right direction toward improving housing affordability.”

A high-wage occupation is defined by the Immigration Department as a job where the median wage is at least 1.3 times the national median wage for all workers, which is currently about $57,000….

Source: Ottawa announces immigration rule changes that will give highly paid foreign workers an edge

Canada is about to announce its new immigration targets. Here’s what we know and don’t know

We will know soon enough to see the trade-offs:

…Since becoming prime minister, Carney has pledged to reduce the share of temporary workers and international students to five per cent of the population by the end of 2027 while maintaining permanent resident admission to under one per cent of Canada’s population annually beyond 2027.

Currently, the share of temporary resident population still stands at 6.7 per cent of the country’s nearly 42 million population. Meanwhile, Ottawa’s hands are tied in shifting more temporary residents to permanent status if it sticks to Carney’s one per cent commitment, meaning the upper target for permanent residents can’t go over 418,000.

Little leeway to raise immigration

There is little wiggle room unless Ottawa finds an innovative way to account for the numbers. It has before. Last year, it rolled out two one-time initiatives to grant permanent residence to 115,000 people with protection status and 33,000 foreign workers in small communities over two years, but the groups were counted on top of the 2026 permanent resident target.

“They’re going to be holding at least relatively close to their 380,000 projection,” said Calgary-based immigration lawyer Mark Holthe. “That five per cent temporary resident target is what’s driving a large portion of this plan. They made a campaign promise and they are going to hit it no matter what.”

Last month, the C.D. Howe Institute, a Toronto-based think tank, recommended an annual admission of 380,000 permanent residents in 2027, and further reductions to 350,000 in 2028, and 340,000 in 2029. It said the five per cent target for temporary residents should be treated as a ceiling and come down to three per cent in the medium and long term.

Managing temporary resident population is not straightforward. Officials can cap new study and work permits to control intakes and transition temporary residents to permanent status, but it takes resources to track and remove people with expired permits.

“The government hasn’t been able to reduce this (population) significantly,” said Parisa Mahboubi, an economist who chairs C.D. Howe’s immigration targets council. “We are going to see a large share of transitions from TR to PR … The government has greater control over that.”

Larissa Bezo, president and CEO of the Canadian Bureau for International Education, doubts that Ottawa will need to raise international student intakes since it didn’t even manage to fill the quotas it set.

“The challenge really has shifted from perhaps managing growth to a period of where we are now having to rebuild confidence,” she noted.

“The larger issue from my perspective is what happens several years from now. Fewer students arriving today means fewer graduates, fewer researchers, fewer health-care workers, fewer engineers, fewer entrepreneurs and fewer permanent residents in the future.”

Priorities and fine-tuning programs

Diab has been clear about her plan to bring in even more French-speaking permanent residents outside Quebec, raising this demographic’s share of the total annual admissions from nine per cent in 2026 to 9.5 per cent in 2027, 10.5 per cent in 2028 and 12 per cent in 2029.

She has also hinted at maintaining the share of permanent residents in economic class at around 64 per cent in 2027 and 2028, while working with provinces and prioritizing talent in key sectors and industries like health care, emerging technologies and skilled trades.

Earlier this year, the Immigration Department held consultations on proposed reforms to the skilled immigration programs as well as the way points are awarded to candidates for their education, work experience and language skills among other factors. It has also asked for public input in setting economic priorities and selection categories for its targeted talent draws.

Stein Monteiro of Signal49 Research said he does not expect drastic changes to immigration policy direction, rather, more fine-tuning of current programs to better align the system with economic needs.

“There’s a lot of other things they’re trying to do aside from the levels,” said Monteiro, lead immigration researcher at the independent research organization, formerly known as The Conference Board of Canada.

“They’re trying to maintain stability by streamlining programs, cutting unnecessary niche programs and then improving on the application process … (which) makes it more predictable for what’s coming out on the other end of the immigration system.”

Targeting high-skilled, high-wage immigrants

C.D. Howe’s Mahboubi said immigration is more than just a numbers game; the type of migrants Canada brings in matters. The system should focus on welcoming high-skilled, high-wage immigrants over low-skilled, non-agricultural temporary foreign workers, she noted.

“We want high-quality students and higher-skilled workers to support our economy,” she said. “There are still more reforms and more oversight needed. We are not there yet.”

Over the past year, Ottawa has stopped accepting applications for immigration programs for start-up entrepreneurs, home care workers, privately sponsored refugees for resettlement (Group of Five), and skilled refugees and displaced people. Few expect they will reopen next year.

“Their focus is on high-wage individuals, so any new program that they’re looking at creating or rolling out are going to target those individuals,” said Holthe, the Calgary lawyer. “Our professionals and executives and people making over $100,000 have no pathways to permanent residence. That’s part of the reason why they’re making changes.”…

Source: Canada is about to announce its new immigration targets. Here’s what we know and don’t know

While I was away: Government and other

Where intent meets reality: Embedding implementation into government decision-making. 

Good reminder by former DMs Flack and Wallace on the importance of implementation. As noted previously in my blog, that was the premise, along with citizen-centred service, that was being the creation of Service Canada, largely neglected subsequently:

  • Implementation considerations need to be at the heart of federal government decision-making.
  • Sequencing of the cabinet review process needs to be altered so that implementation issues are canvassed from the beginning.
  • Political parties should be able to consult departments on implementation issues when developing their campaign platforms.
  • The “challenge” function of central agencies, focused on reducing risk, should be recalibrated with a complementary “lift” function, focused on helping successful implementation.
  • Projects should be funded to enable success, including through realistic costing ranges. There should be greater delegation of project authority, with more timely approval of interim decisions for complex projects.
  • Program design should be simplified to improve delivery and reduce costs.

Hancock: Spectators at the Apocalypse

Hard to be optimistic these days…:

… Fear, complacency, helplessness – each is amplified by the digital world we now inhabit. The same screens that frighten us also distract and tranquillize us. The outrage that once gathered people in the public square is now discharged in the comments section – just as angry, perhaps more so, but detached from an organizing movement or even an organizing idea. Together with our virtual comrades, we like, mock, share, sign online petitions, and post those memes, satisfied that we have registered our dissent. Then we close the tab. We have not stopped protesting; we have dematerialized protest.

Worse, as Neil Postman warned 40 years ago, our media turn disasters into entertainment. We consume looming global crises in the same format, and with the same thumb-swipe, as sports highlights, celebrity gossip, and ads for sneakers. An existential warning from a climate scientist is queued between a book review and a cat video. Wildfire devastation becomes striking drone footage. Catastrophe becomes content.

Historian Christopher Clark described the leaders who stumbled into the First World War as “sleepwalkers” – actors who helped create a catastrophe they neither intended nor fully understood. Our predicament may be stranger. We are sleepwalking with our eyes wide open. The warnings are everywhere. We see catastrophes unfolding. We can even imagine how they end. And still we sit and watch.

Candice Malcolm wins the 2026 George Jonas Freedom Award

Well worth reading for a better understanding of some right-leaning media entrepreneurs. Interesting mix of being off the grid in terms of one’s personal life, and very much on the grid for one’s political life:

…So we have to ask why. What happened? How did our country fall apart so fast in my adult lifetime?

While I feel incredibly lucky and truly blessed by God, over the last few years I have become incredibly disillusioned with our institutions — because I can, I mostly avoid them.

I don’t trust the media establishment, so I built my own media company to report the news and tell the truth.

I don’t trust the medical establishment, and so I chose an unmedicated homebirth rather than stepping foot in a hospital post-Covid.

I’m so distrustful of our food systems that Kaz and I bought a farm where we raise our own chickens; eat grass-fed, hormone-free beef; we grow our own vegetables; and bake our own bread.

And finally, we homeschool our children.

That’s the anti-establishment trifecta: home births, homesteading and homeschooling.

Anil Anora: Neither Uncontrolled Acceleration Nor Technological Paralysis – Here’s What AI Governance Should Look Like

Nice to see this thoughtful and comprehensive look at AI governance issues. Elephant in the room of course it that Canada, like many other countries, are largely at the mercy of the US-based tech companies:

  • Every AI initiative should begin with articulation of the public or organizational purpose it is intended to serve.
  • AI governance cannot be separated from data governance.
  • For consequential and frontier systems, a developer or deployer should be required to present a safety case: a structured, evidence-supported argument that a system is acceptably safe for a defined operating context. 
  • A so-called “kill switch” should not be treated as a single button or a rhetorical promise.
  • Responsibility must follow the capacity to prevent harm.
  • Trust cannot be created through communications after the important decisions have already been made.
  • AI systems, model weights, data and compute cross borders, while legal authority remains largely national.

Finally, governance must be able to learn and adjust. Legislatures should set rights, duties, prohibitions and institutional mandates. Technically capable regulators should update evaluation protocols and standards as evidence develops, subject to transparency and oversight. Regulatory sandboxes, public-interest research capacity, shared testing infrastructure and clear procurement rules can lower barriers to responsible innovation. Adaptive governance should mean disciplined learning within democratic boundaries, not permanent discretion for governments or firms.

HESA: The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up

Yet another example of mismanagement:

….The first part I know for sure – it’s how the federal government got drawn into this mess and also why it eventually cut all private institutions out of the grants systems in last year’s federal budget (something I wrote about back here before I had any of this context). The feds don’t have the power to cut out any single institution from the program (only provinces have that), and so the feds spent most of 2025 asking Ontario “what the hell is going on in those institutions”? And when they were fobbed off with various weak-ass answers (”it’s a post-COVID thing…online education is big now, we shouldn’t try to stifle innovation…”), the feds pulled the plug. So, important data point here: the feds knew there was something bad in a specific few institutions over a year ago and asked the province to do something. The province chose not to act.

The second part, re: the nature of the scam, I don’t know for sure. Details will presumably come out in county at some point: Allison Jones of the Canadian Press published some juicy preliminary tidbits about ten days ago. But just for now, assume that something was happening, something bad enough that Career Colleges Ontario (CCO), the association which represents private post-secondary institutions in Ontario, was moved to tell the government – “we have bad actors in our sector and you need to act”. We know this is the case because the government said so in its press release last week. But again, check the date. CCO did this in January 2025. So why did it take so long for the province to move?
(I assume there are journalists out there looking at political contributions made by the owners of these institutions. This work will be helpful in understanding provincial government motivations).

One might try to excuse the government’s lengthy time-to-get-off-its-ass by saying “oh that’s just the speed of government, it never does anything quickly.” But this is not true. The government may have waited until this summer to move against bad actor private colleges, but it used the crisis to attack students and OSAP itself much earlier….

Source: The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up