Alberta’s forthcoming referendum on independence is a clear and meaningful threat to Canada’s safety, integrity, and prosperity. But a few of the other questions on Premier Danielle Smith’s democracy-o-rama — ten ballots, all to be hand-counted, with mayhem all but guaranteed at this point — might be even more dangerous. That’s because they deliberately invite a particular conversation around immigration policy that threatens to further undermine Canada’s unique consensus on the issue. Worse, it tries to import American-style nativism in the process.

The four questions on immigration policy are not, in and of themselves, racist or prejudiced. Smith is a good politician, after all, and she knows how to frame ideas and issues in ways that give her plausible deniability and cover with the general public while still sending the right signals to the far-right base she actually works for. They do not propose banning immigration, targeting certain populations, or forcing newcomers to adhere to a particular standard of dress and comportment — you know, the way Quebec’s government has been doing for years now. Instead, they ask if Alberta should have more control over immigration, whether new temporary residents should qualify for social support programs, and whether the government should charge them a fee for said services. These are reasonably framed questions. 

They’re also the tip of an anti-immigrant iceberg, and it’s one that both the Smith government and her federal Conservative allies seem determined to help surface. I’m not sure whether this reflects their shared fascination with US-style grievance politics or simply an ongoing need to keep their base riled up about something the federal government is (or isn’t) doing. But I’m very sure about one thing: if the rest of us don’t fight back against it, it will poison and pollute our politics in this country. It will also undermine one of our greatest competitive advantages as a country — our long and comparatively less troubled history of integrating immigrants, and the sense of civic nationalism it has both engendered and enriched.

One of the biggest criticisms I have of the Trudeau Liberal government is its failure to better protect that advantage. There was, in the post-COVID years, a period of too many people coming into a country whose institutions and systems hadn’t been prepared to handle them, and the Trudeau government did a poor job of explaining why it was happening. But........

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