Ten Ballots and No Vote: A Temporary Resident Reads Alberta's Referendum
On Thanksgiving weekend, a non-voting temporary resident pulls up a chair at Alberta's table and reflects on ten referendum questions, the words still undefined, and what each answer would and wouldn't change.
A reflection, not a recommendation. I don’t have a vote, and I won’t tell anyone how to use theirs, or whether to. What follows is a close reading of a ballot by someone it touches.
The stakes, and the missing vote
It is Thanksgiving weekend, which is either perfect or dreadful timing for a piece about who gets a seat at the table.
A few facts about my chair. Our family of five landed in Alberta in the summer of 2024. Our third year here began in August. Our three children are in Alberta schools, and we have paid every school fee, in full, every year. We pay tax. We are non-voting temporary residents, and on October 19 the ballot box will carry on perfectly well without us.
I’m not writing from grievance. Being affected by a decision you can’t vote on is, to my mind, less an injustice than the plain definition of the word “temporary”, and grievance is a poor use of a long weekend. But I’d be a rotten narrator if I pretended the chair has no view. It has a view of the ballot. That is what this is.
Who is at the table
Anyone who has fed a crowd knows that dinner is mostly a seating plan. The food is the easy part.
At this table, the ones holding the carving knife are the voters: citizens, many of whom have sat in these chairs for generations, and who on October 19 will be handed ten ballots. Beside them sit the permanent residents, place cards firmly in position. Then there are guests like us, invited by a process involving a heroic quantity of paperwork, seated, passing the dishes, and in our case chipping in for the groceries, as a certain folder of school receipts will testify.
Out in the hallway, a few more parties are waiting. The other provinces, whose ovens would be needed for some of the dishes. And the house itself, which belongs to the whole family, and which has views of its own on what happens in its dining room.
On the 19th, the voters answer the menu, dish by dish. I’m at the table, within arm’s reach of every dish, with no say in what is served. So I’ll do what a guest can do. I’ll read the menu carefully, and report from the chair.
The menu
Here are the ten dishes, as printed on the ballots, so you can flip back to them. They come from Elections Alberta, and they are handed out in an odd order: Question 10 first.
| # | On the ballot |
|---|---|
| 1 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?“ |
| 2 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?“ |
| 3 | ”Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs?“ |
| 4 | ”Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the healthcare and education systems?“ |
| 5 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or citizenship card, to vote in an Alberta provincial election?“ |
| 6 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeal courts?“ |
| 7 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to abolish the unelected federal Senate?“ |
| 8 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to allow provinces to opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction such as health care, education, and social services, without a province losing any of the associated federal funding for use in its social programs?“ |
| 9 | ”Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws when the province’s laws and federal laws conflict?“ |
| 10 | ”Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?” Option 1: “Alberta should remain a province of Canada.” Option 2: “The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.” |
I’ll take them in the order I find easiest to digest: the grace first, the side dishes next, and the turkey last.
The grace: Question 10
Question 10 is counted first, by hand, and it is rather like the grace. Before anyone reaches for the potatoes, it asks about the table itself: whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada, or whether the government should begin the legal process towards a binding vote on separation.
What it would do is smaller than the occasion suggests. According to Elections Alberta, the result is ordered to be non-binding, and an Option 2 result would ask the government to begin a legal process; it separates nothing. The premier has said that a second, binding referendum faces timing questions, including provincial legislation against holding one within a year of a general election, and the next election is scheduled for October 18, 2027.
I have no opinion to offer on this one. I’ll say only what it feels like from my chair: it is an odd sensation to hear the size of the dining room discussed while the soup is still hot and you are still working out where to put your elbows.
The side dishes: Questions 6 to 9
Judges, the Senate, opting out of federal programs, and whose law wins when two collide. These are the dishes that cannot be cooked in one kitchen. Each of the four asks Alberta to work with “the governments of other willing provinces”, which is a polite way of saying that the recipe needs other households to bring something, and that “willing” is doing a great deal of the lifting.
They matter, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Question 8 even names health care, education and social services, so I’ll be watching it with interest. But from where I sit these four are at the far end of the table. I can see them. I can’t reach them, and because they depend on other provinces, I’d be surprised to see them change what lands on my plate any time soon.
The turkey: Questions 1 to 5
This is the main course, and the part of the meal that goes straight to my chair.
Question 1 is about how many chairs, who decides, and who gets first call on new jobs. Immigration is a shared field of jurisdiction, and the Canadian Bar Association’s Alberta branch has noted that a unilateral provincial cap could face serious federal paramountcy issues. A political scientist quoted alongside it reads the question as a bid for a political mandate to negotiate with Ottawa. The province, for its part, points to a cost: it estimates that delivering social services to temporary residents costs Alberta taxpayers more than $1 billion per year.
Question 2 hands out place cards for “an Alberta-approved immigration status”, and the ballot’s own examples of what the card unlocks are health care, education and other social services, which is to say most of the meal. The cards are not all written yet. Asked about the finer parameters, the immigration minister said, “we’re still working that out”. It is a little like being asked to approve a seating plan before the names have gone on the cards. Perhaps the arrangement will be splendid. One does like to see the plan.
Question 3 is a 12-month wait before the social-support plates arrive. We are in our third year, so on the calendar we are past it twice over. Whether time already served would count is not something the ballot says, and I won’t guess.
Question 4 is the cover charge, and it is the question that comes with a figure attached. The amount would be decided after the vote, though the premier has since floated $1,900 per person, pointing to comparable premiums in the United Kingdom. Her reasoning is that if someone is here temporarily, they “really should pay their own way”. That is a fairness argument, and it deserves to be stated the way its authors would recognize it. I’d add only that “a reasonable fee” is a phrase that hasn’t yet met a number it is bound to, and that I haven’t found an answer on whether it would reach people already seated.
Question 5 is about the front door: proof of citizenship to vote. It is the one question where I’m not even a bystander, so I shall leave it to those who are.
Which brings me to what a yes or a no would, and wouldn’t, change. Elections Alberta lists all five as non-binding, and the province says the details of any new legislation, including any fee, would be decided by the legislature afterwards. As I read it, a yes is a signal and a mandate rather than a statute, and a no leaves today’s rules in place until someone proposes otherwise.
I’ll admit my mind goes to outcomes. Of course it does. I go through the five like a hungry man working out whether the protein or the vegetables should be served first. And what I find is a planning problem: no amount, no final definition of who is covered, no word, that I can find, on whether people already here are included. I, and indeed any temporary resident who needs to, can budget for a price. What none of us can do is budget for an undefined variable.
The bill for the dinner
Every number in this debate arrives with a second number standing behind it, looking slightly embarrassed.
Take the province’s $1 billion a year. CBC’s explainer puts it across health, education and social services, and sets it against about $150 million in provincial taxes. A Tyee fact-check says the same figures give $6.67 in services per $1 of tax, not $10, a gap an economist attributes to income rather than status. Two cooks, one receipt, two totals. I’m not here to adjudicate. I’m asking only that both stay on the table.
There is also the matter of who staffs the kitchen. In 2024, 36.0 per cent of Alberta’s physicians were international medical graduates, and 12.7 per cent of the nursing workforce was internationally educated. The Canadian Institute for Health Information’s own caveat is that those figures describe where someone earned a first degree, not their immigration status today. Many will be citizens or permanent residents, so this is not a statement about temporary residents. It is a statement about how much of Alberta’s care was trained elsewhere.
And there is one more bill, which I suppose a guest can only report one household at a time. We file the taxes. We pay the school fees. We have no provincial health coverage to show for either, yet. The receipts are in a folder. I mention it only because the debate keeps reaching for a picture of who pays.
What it looks like from this end of the table
The word “temporary” has more give in it than it first appears. A family that has finished two school years, paid its rent on time, filed its taxes twice and is getting ready for a third winter is still, on paper, temporary, and by every other measure, permanent jobs included, rather settled. It is an odd thing to be both at once.
I’m not the only one at this end of the table. One temporary resident quoted by CBC, who can’t vote, described the questions about limiting services as unfair. Immigrant-serving organizations have reported a rise in hate-related reports as the campaign has gone on, while the province has said it condemns all forms of hate and violence toward any community. It is possible to hold both facts at the same table.
The habits I’m trying to practise are small, and they are the habits of a decent host as much as a decent guest. Read the whole menu before judging a dish. Note what hasn’t been cooked yet. Separate what is binding from what is a signal. Hold both readings of the menu, and of the numbers. Then, at the table, share your excitement and your reservations by all means, but courtesy and etiquette ask that you do it without turning those observations, or any feelings, into an instruction for anyone else.
This weekend, Canadians everywhere, Albertans included, sit down to give thanks, and so will we. Turkey, gravy, potatoes, the whole works, and this year ten more things to weigh up on a ballot. This October the table has many chairs, and Albertans have a menu to choose from. Gratitude, choice and uncertainty, it turns out, can share a plate.
Brian Ssennoga writes, from Edmonton, Alberta on family and newcomer life in Canada.
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