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All the neat stuff Quebec can do, but Alberta can’t

The Francophone province has latitude when it comes to immigration, the criminal code and the Canadian constitution

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This month, Ottawa immediately slapped down a request from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith for her province to have more say over the appointment of Supreme Court justices.

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Two of the nine justices on Canada’s top court are meant to represent Western Canada. And with one of those, Sheilah Martin, set to retire, Smith penned a letter requesting that Ottawa drop a new mandate requiring that the next judge be French/English bilingual.   

All the neat stuff Quebec can do, but Alberta can’t Back to video

Smith pointed out that not a lot of Westerners speak French, and the requirement thus represented a “systemic barrier” for most Alberta jurists.

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Within days, Attorney General Sean Fraser rejected the letter out of hand, telling a press scrum on Parliament Hill that the current system is “working very well.”

The reaction was entirely different from how the feds reacted to a similar request from Quebec. The whole reason the bilingualism mandate exists in the first place is because Quebec requested it, and the feds responded by immediately enshrining it into law in 2023.  

With Western alienation hitting all-time highs, there are plenty in Alberta to point out that this happens a lot. Quebec will have extraordinary powers over the workings of its own affairs, only for the same privileges to be denied to the likes of Alberta.

Some of this is due to federal favouritism, and some of it is simply due to the fact that Quebec has been bolder in these matters than Alberta. But a cursory summary is below of all the neat things Quebec can do, but Alberta can’t.  

Quebec has special powers over immigration

After Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s failed attempt to have Quebec constitutionally recognized as a “distinct society” with the Meech Lake Accords, one of the consolation prizes was that Quebec was given special powers over immigration.

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The 1991 Canada–Québec Accord allowed Quebec to set its own immigration levels, and to set the parameters on who those immigrants were. This is why Quebec’s immigrant mix is distinct from other parts of Canada; the province disproportionately brings in newcomers from French-speaking regions of Africa.

Programs like the Provincial Nominee Program allow Canada’s other provinces to have some say over their immigration streams, but nowhere near to the same extent as Quebec.

Still, Quebec doesn’t have total immigration control, which was best illustrated by the fact that it remained powerless to reject tens of thousands of asylum seekers who began streaming into Quebec via the illegal Roxham Road border crossing in 2016.

And immigration is a rare category in which Ottawa has actually pushed back against Quebec demands in recent years. In 2024, when Quebec Premier François Legault demanded that Quebec be given total sovereign control over immigration, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau told him no.

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Quebec runs its own pension plan and income tax agency

Long before he ever became a major contender in federal politics, a young Stephen Harper co-signed a 2001 document published in the National Post since known as the “Firewall Letter.” After then-prime minister Jean Chrétien had scored yet another majority government, the letter urged Alberta’s then-premier, Ralph Klein, to pursue an “Alberta Agenda” walling itself off from federal influence.

The two top demands were that Alberta establish its own pension fund, and that the province “collect our own revenue from personal income tax.”

These likely made the top of the list because of the example of Quebec, which had been alone among the provinces in already performing both of those tasks in-house. And Quebec only did so by eschewing federal control over taxation and pensions from the get-go.

In 1954, when Canadian provincial governments had just finished ceding income tax powers to the federal government, Quebec went out of its way to assert the power for itself, even if it meant that Quebecers would henceforth have to file two separate tax returns. Similarly, when Ottawa created the Canada Pension Plan in 1965, Quebec opted out and instead inaugurated its own Québec Pension Plan the next year.

In recent years, Alberta has actively revived the idea of in-house pensions and income taxes, as part of Smith’s generalized efforts to “strengthen (Alberta) sovereignty within a united Canada.”

But if those two particular ideas have largely fizzled out, it’s because it’s much harder to detach Alberta from the federal tax and pension systems, rather than simply refuse to join them in the first place.

In the case of an Alberta Pension Plan, for instance, one major hurdle is figuring out what share of the Canada Pension Plan Alberta would be owed if it decided to withdraw. Naturally, Ottawa’s estimate is much lower than Alberta’s estimate.

Quebec is allowed to redefine murder

Alberta hasn’t tried this yet, so it’s entirely possible they could get away with it. But in 2024, the Legault government announced that it was going to start ignoring sections of the Criminal Code of Canada covering murder.

In other words, they were going to allow Quebecers to start engaging in actions that Canadian law officially considered to be homicide, but simply order their prosecutors not to enforce it.

Specifically, Quebec’s health ministry told doctors to start administering MAID to unresponsive patients, provided that the patient had prepared an “advance directive.”

But Canadian MAID law requires patients to be awake to consent to their own death — and federal legislators had explicitly rejected an “advance directive” regime. As such, doctors were effectively being told to commit homicide.

Which is why, in 2024, Quebec’s director of criminal and penal prosecutions told the doctors that nobody would be coming after them.

While Ottawa issued a lukewarm warning that the “criminal law applies across Canada,” they otherwise expressed no objection.

Quebec can unilaterally rewrite the constitution

This is another action that Alberta hasn’t tried, so there’s still a possibility it might work. Starting in 2021, the Legault government pioneered the idea of having Quebec unilaterally rewrite the Canadian constitution.

They picked out some sections they didn’t like, rewrote them and then sent the revisions to Ottawa with a request that they reprint the constitution with the new passages. And Ottawa did so without a moment’s hesitation.

Those passages included a new line defining Quebec as a “nation,” and another one stating that “the only official language of Québec is French.”

The revisions were all made to the British North America Act, the 1867 document enshrining Canada as a sovereign country. Quebec’s argument was that the British North America Act is also the document that created Quebec, so they were really only amending their own constitution.

But this argument became slightly more tenuous when they started picking out aspects of the wider constitution that they didn’t feel like following anymore. This was the case with the constitutional requirement that members of provincial legislatures couldn’t take their seats without swearing an “oath of allegiance.”

The rule is contained within Section 128 of the British North America Act, so Quebec sent Ottawa a revision reading “Section 128 does not apply to Quebec.”

And, sure enough, if you check the federal government’s official copy of the British North America Act, the revision has been added.

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