The Danielle Smith government has made a lot of noise about direct democracy. However, its actions relating to past and future votes should leave electors questioning the province's methods and motives for this fall's ballot initiative.
The government itself is proposing a whole slew of referendum questions, which are expected to be put to voters in October 2026. And naturally, it has chosen to consult the people on the thorniest of wedge issues.
One batch of questions has to do with immigration-related issues, more particularly on restricting access to health and social services for certain types of non-citizens. The cost of such services is presented as being $1 billion. That sounds like a lot of money but represents slightly more than one per cent of the 2026 budget, whose expenditures are listed as $89 billion.
Another has to do with constitutional matters, certainly meant more for symbolism than anything else. Anyone who remembers the series of failed attempts to amend the Constitution, extending from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, can tell you what a politically traumatic experience that was.
On both counts, the subject is so wide and complicated, even legal and constitutional experts cannot agree on what it all means. And perhaps to provide a glimpse into the real reason for the referendum questions, the province's own explanations for the questions paints the federal government as the villain behind all of our problems, resulting in additional budget expenses and apparent unfair treatment in Confederation.
The government has also made it easier in some ways for groups to petition elections authorities to propose a question to electors — most notably for a contingent of its own base, which wishes for Alberta to separate from Canada. But with recent news about the improper sharing of electoral lists with people and entities normally not entitled access to them, the whole petition process has been thrown into question. There is no way for any individual to verify if their personal information was illegitimately added to a petition using leaked data, or to remove their name from a petition if such a thing could be proven.
Of course, after driving those wedges into the electorate, there is no obligation for the province to act on what we say. Indeed, where the Alberta government could have demonstrated its goodwill, it failed miserably to do so.
In October 2021, the province asked Albertans whether they wanted to follow neighbouring jurisdictions on time changes, as many of them were starting to express interest in adopting daylight time year-round. In the vote, which was tacked onto civic elections that year, electors voted by a thin margin against the proposal. “It's as close as it gets to a tie, I think it with about a 2,500 vote difference, but we respect, certainly, the majority in that referendum,” said then-premier Jason Kenney after the results were announced.
