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Alberta Wants to Vote on Who Belongs, and the CUSMA Review Is Two Months Away. Nobody's Ready.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Alberta Wants to Vote on Who Belongs
Danielle Smith is putting immigration on the ballot. The Alberta premier has announced five referendum questions for October, and they sound a bit more like loyalty tests than policy consultations. One of the questions asks whether Albertans should get "first priority" for new jobs. Another would restrict provincially funded social programs to people with "Alberta-approved immigration status." A third would require passports, birth certificates, or citizenship cards to vote in provincial elections.
Smith says the province's $9.4 billion deficit and 600,000 new residents over five years are proof that "federal experiments in open borders" broke the system. That's a different tune than she was singing in 2023, when she was cheering for Alberta to hit a population of 10 million.
The trouble is that immigrants are over-represented in the parts of Alberta's economy that actually keep it running. Teacher organizations say education funding is already the lowest in the country, and housing and healthcare gaps are failures of provincial spending, not immigration ones.
Alberta's not the first province to treat immigration as a pressure valve for budget problems, but putting it to a public vote in October sets a tone that many Canadian expats - many who left Alberta themselves - will recognize.
Read more: The Conversation / The Tyee
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The CUSMA Review Is Two Months Away. Nobody's Ready.
The July 1 deadline for the CUSMA review is coming on fast and all three countries are coming to the table with different playbooks. The United States wants government ownership stakes in domestic mines and direct control over the pricing of critical minerals. Mexico has reversed course on oil and gas liberalization, and now seems to think that state ownership is the way forward. Canada is betting that it can negotiate minerals inside the trade deal rather than getting a separate agreement.
It seems like an ill-advised time to show up without a game face on. Canadian copper and potash are already getting hit with tariffs of 10 to 25 percent, Mexico's peso is on the retreat, and the original NAFTA renegotiation (which turned NAFTA into CUSMA) took more than nine months and eight rounds of talks. There’s no reason to expect this renegotiation to be any quicker.
PM Carney has been on the move, apparently to line up alternative trade partners, and the Building Canada Act is intended to speed up resource extraction for Asian and European markets, but all of that is, or should be, a hedge, not a solution. If CUSMA can't be renewed on workable terms, Canadian exporters in the U.S. and Mexico are going to get battered first, Canadian expats in those countries will be right behind them.
Read more: The Conversation / Canadian Chamber of Commerce