She's hateful; she's MAGA; but is she qualified?

All references cited in this article are part of the public record. The assertions and conclusions presented, unless otherwise noted, have not been legally contested. The title and characterizations of the Premier are the opinion of the author.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has spent 2026 repeating a single line: Temporary residents cost the province about $1 billion a year in health care and education, while contributing only about $150 million in taxes.¹ She has used it to sell an October 19 referendum question asking whether people without permanent status should pay a "reasonable fee or premium" to use Alberta's hospitals and schools, and in September she put a price on it: Roughly $1,900 per person, per year.²

When I first heard the line, my response was simple: It's not about the tax revenue they generate — it's the jobs they fill. If she doesn't know better, she's blatantly unqualified.

That is still my response. But a premier's claim deserves to be tested against the record rather than against a gut reaction, so here is the record.

Her Word, Not Mine: "Workers"

Smith does not call these people "residents" when she wants a reaction. She calls them workers. At a sold-out Edmonton leader's dinner on March 18, 2026, she asked: "Should guest workers, who probably only generate $5,000 to $6,000 worth of income, should they also then be getting an equivalent amount worth 10 times the amount in social benefits?"¹

So take her at her word. The figure she attaches to that word — about 246,000 people — is actually Alberta's entire non-permanent resident population, which Statistics Canada put closer to 280,000 this summer.² It includes roughly 45,000 school-age children. But the province's own population report shows who the rest are: As of July 2025, 56 per cent held work permits and another 7 per cent held combined work-study permits — together, more than 180,000 people legally authorized to work in Alberta.³ Another 17 per cent were students, who may work up to 24 hours a week off campus.⁴ Asylum claimants are routinely issued work permits as well.

That leaves the Premier with a problem of her own making. If they are "guest workers," as she says, then they are filling jobs in Alberta, and the value they produce does not show up in a provincial tax line. If most of them are not workers, then her "guest worker" framing is false. She cannot have it both ways.

As for "$5,000 to $6,000 worth of income": Alberta's minimum wage has been frozen at $15 an hour since 2018, the lowest in Canada, and even that pays more than $31,000 a year for a single full-time job.⁵ Whatever she meant by that number, it does not describe a working person in Alberta, or in any province in Canada. Her "10 times the amount" does not hold up either: Ten times $5,000 to $6,000 is $50,000 to $60,000 in benefits per person, yet her own $1 billion spread across 246,000 temporary residents works out to about $4,000 each.

What the $150 Million Leaves Out

The Tyee took the government's arithmetic apart in September. The $1 billion is made up of roughly $400 million in health care — 1.27 per cent of Alberta's $31.8 billion health budget — plus about $12,000 per student for some 47,000 children in school. The $150 million counts only provincial tax. It leaves out federal income tax, GST, property taxes paid through rent, tuition, and the economic activity of every business these people work for and shop at.⁶

Even on the government's own numbers, independent economist Ben Atkinson pointed out that $150 million against $1 billion is a ratio of about $6.67 in services per tax dollar — not the $10 the Premier keeps quoting. And the comparison is rigged from the start: Albertans as a whole paid about $16 billion in provincial income tax in 2024-25 against more than $35 billion in health and education spending. Nobody pays for their own hospital with their provincial income tax. That gap is filled by royalties, federal transfers, and other revenue — for everyone.⁶

The most telling number is the one the Premier never mentions. Non-permanent residents were about 5.5 per cent of Alberta's population but accounted for just 1.27 per cent of its health-care costs.⁶ They are young, they are working, and they use the system far less than the average Albertan. A 2025 Canadian study found hospitalization rates among temporary residents were lower than in the general population.⁷ By the Premier's own logic, they are subsidizing everyone else.

What She Already Knows — Because Her Government Built It

The most damning part of Smith's claim is not the arithmetic. It is that her own government has spent years telling the world the opposite.

Alberta is Calling. The UCP launched this campaign to recruit workers from across Canada, touting low taxes and affordable housing. Under Smith, its 2023 phase targeted shortages in skilled trades, health care, food service and hospitality, accounting, engineering and technology, backed by a signing bonus expected to cost $17 million.⁸ A government does not pay people to move to a province that has no shortage of workers.

Her own letter to Ottawa. In March 2024, Smith wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to immediately double Alberta's Provincial Nominee Program allocation to 20,000, plus 10,000 more for Ukrainian evacuees. She wrote that "Alberta continues to be the economic engine of Canada" and that the federal cap "negatively impacts Alberta's ability to grow and diversify its economy."⁹ Less than two years later, the newcomers she asked for are the "cost" she campaigns against.

The Alberta Advantage Immigration Program. The province's own nominee streams — the Alberta Opportunity Stream, the Rural Renewal Stream, the Tourism and Hospitality Stream — are built to turn temporary workers already employed in Alberta into permanent residents.¹⁰ For 2026, the program says it is prioritizing health care: Registered nurses, nurse aides, lab technicians, personal support workers.¹¹ The pipeline to permanent residency that Alberta designed runs through the temporary workers Smith now wants to charge at the door.

In other words, the Premier's government knows exactly why these people are here. It recruited them.

Who Is Actually Doing the Work

Agriculture. About 36 per cent of approved Temporary Foreign Worker positions fall under the primary agriculture stream. Industry estimates put temporary foreign workers at 30 to 40 per cent of Alberta's feedlot workforce. The Alberta Federation of Agriculture is blunt: "Foreign workers don't replace Canadians, they fill roles where no Canadians apply."¹² Rural population decline and an aging workforce are not problems a health premium fixes.

Health care. Nationally, newcomers make up 25 per cent of registered nurses, 42 per cent of nurse aides and 37 per cent of physicians.⁷ As of September 30, 2025, 16,060 temporary workers across Canada held permits to work in health occupations, and 57 per cent of those under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program were nurse aides, orderlies and patient service associates.¹³ Two Calgary physicians put it plainly in April: Alberta cannot rely on migrant workers to staff its hospitals and care homes while proposing barriers to their own care.⁷

Hospitality and major projects. When Smith floated the $1,900 premium, she did it on stage with Calgary Chamber of Commerce president Deborah Yedlin — who warned that it could drag on the labour needed to build major projects and would fall on employers with "very thin margins" who "need to be able to access the labour that they need to run their businesses."² Smith's answer: "Is that $1,900 fee going to make or break your business? If it is, you're probably hiring into a low-skill profession."¹⁴ The people who harvest the food, clean the hospital rooms, and run the hotel kitchens in Banff are, in the Premier's framing, a problem to be priced.

The Common Sense Part

There is a real issue underneath all this. Alberta grew by roughly 600,000 people in five years, and the Premier says schools will need about 90,000 more seats.¹⁴ Federal temporary intake did outrun planning, and Ottawa has already responded, cutting new temporary foreign worker admissions from 368,000 to 230,000 for 2026.¹² Nobody serious argues that infrastructure does not have to keep pace with population.

But common sense says the answer to growth is building for it — the schools, clinics and housing that a growing workforce pays for through the economy it drives — not charging a fee to the people doing the growing. Common sense says that a fee on low-wage workers gets passed to their employers, and from employers to prices. Common sense says a young, healthy, working population that uses a fraction of its share of health care is not the reason Alberta's hospitals are struggling. And common sense says you do not recruit workers with signing bonuses in one year and campaign against them as a burden in the next.

Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi put the underlying point bluntly: Every Albertan draws more from the health system than they pay in provincial tax. That is what a public health system is.¹⁴

Why "MAGA" Is Not a Cheap Shot

Smith has earned the label on her own record. In March 2025, she told Breitbart she had asked Trump administration officials to pause tariffs on Canada until after the federal election, and she said Pierre Poilievre's perspective was "very much in sync" with the Trump administration.¹⁵ She has been photographed with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and at a private Florida gala she and Ben Shapiro discussed how to help Canada elect "solid allies" to the administration that was threatening to annex it.¹⁶

The immigration campaign fits the same playbook: Take a real pressure point — housing, school space, hospital wait times — and assign it to the least powerful people in the province. It is effective politics. It is not governing.

Whose Side Is She On?

Smith insists she is a federalist. "I support Alberta remaining in Canada," she has said. "That is how I would vote on separation in a provincial referendum."¹⁷ Take her at her word, and then look at what she has done.

In January 2026, it was reported that U.S. State Department officials had met the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project in Washington three times in nine months, discussing how an independent Alberta might switch to U.S. currency and handle border security. The group was seeking a $500-billion line of credit from the U.S. Treasury to help bankroll a new country.¹⁸ B.C. Premier David Eby called it what it was: "To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old-fashioned word for that. And that word is treason." Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Conservative, urged Smith to "stand up and say enough is enough."¹⁹

Smith's response was that the U.S. "should respect Canadian sovereignty," and that she would not demonize Albertans open to separation because they had "legitimate grievances" with Ottawa.¹⁹ Four months later, on May 21, 2026, under pressure from the separatist wing of her own party, she added a separation question to the October 19 ballot, worded to get around a court ruling against a vote on separation.¹⁷ It is the same ballot that asks Albertans to charge temporary residents for a doctor.

There is no evidence that Danielle Smith wants Alberta to leave Canada, let alone join the United States, and she says she will vote to stay. But leadership is measured by what a premier enables, not only by how she says she will vote. A premier who asked Trump officials to time their tariffs around a Canadian election, who said the opposition leader was "very much in sync" with the administration threatening to annex us, and who handed a ballot question to a movement courting that same administration, has some explaining to do.

Consider the contrast. Foreign officials meeting people who want to break up the country get a gentle request to respect sovereignty. A nurse aide on a work permit, emptying bedpans in an Alberta care home, gets a $1,900 bill. Albertans can decide for themselves whose side that is.

Pricing People at the Door

Strip away the arithmetic and listen to what the Premier is actually objecting to. At the same Edmonton dinner she said: "We used to have people who would come with high paying jobs that were in fields that we couldn't fill ourselves. The federal government changed it to allow more international students, temporary cohort workers, low-income workers, asylum seekers."¹ In September she added that anyone here temporarily "should really pay their own way," and that an employer who cannot absorb a $1,900 fee is "probably hiring into a low-skill profession."¹⁴

That is not an immigration policy. It is a sort by wallet. The newcomers she welcomes are the ones who arrive with money. The ones she lists as the problem — low-income workers and asylum seekers — are the ones who arrive without it. About one in ten of Alberta's non-permanent residents is an asylum claimant.³ A family fleeing a war, fleeing persecution for their religion, fleeing poverty, or simply wanting their children to have a better chance at life does not arrive with savings. That is the whole reason they came.

Deciding who deserves a doctor or a classroom seat based on what they can pay, rather than on who they are, what they do, or what they need, is discrimination. It is discrimination against the poor, and because poverty is never spread evenly across the world, it falls hardest on people from the poorest and most dangerous places on earth. A fee that a wealthy newcomer will not notice and a refugee cannot pay is not neutral. It is designed to filter.

Canada has done this before, and it has apologized for it. From 1885, Chinese immigrants were charged a head tax of $50, raised to $500 by 1903, a sum meant to keep people out who could not afford it. Ottawa collected about $23 million. In 2006 a Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, stood in the House of Commons and offered a full apology.²⁰ A price at the door is not a new idea. It is an old one Canada already decided was wrong.

Alberta's own history argues against it too. The first Ukrainian settlers arrived in 1891 fleeing poverty and oppression. They homesteaded northeast of Edmonton, cleared forest by hand, lived off their gardens, and sent the men to the mines and lumber camps for cash. By 1914 their settlement stretched more than 100 kilometres.²¹ Under a means test they would have been turned away. Instead they built a large part of the province Danielle Smith now governs.

The Premier knows this. In the same 2024 letter in which she asked Ottawa to double Alberta's immigration numbers, she asked for 10,000 more spots for Ukrainians escaping Russia's invasion — people who fled a war with whatever they could carry.⁹ She was right to ask. Compassion should not depend on which war you are fleeing, or on what is in your bank account when you arrive. The measure of a newcomer is not what they bring through the door. It is what they build once they are inside.

The Settlers Who Came With Nothing

Before anyone argues that Canada has always taken only newcomers who could pay their own way, it is worth remembering who actually built this country, and Alberta in particular. For most of its history, Canada's newcomers were white Europeans, and by any realistic standard a great many of them were poor.

In 1847 nearly 100,000 people, most of them Irish families fleeing the famine, arrived at the Grosse Île quarantine station below Quebec City, starving and sick with typhus after crossing in ships unfit to carry passengers. More than 5,000 died at sea, 5,424 are buried on the island, and thousands more died in Canadian cities.²² The survivors had nothing. Their descendants are now doctors, farmers, premiers and prime ministers.

Between 1869 and 1948, more than 100,000 British children, some as young as two, were shipped to Canada from orphanages, workhouses and families in financial hardship, to work as indentured labour on farms and in domestic service.²³ They were the poorest of the poor, sent across an ocean alone. They grew up, raised families, and fought for Canada in two world wars.

The prairies were settled the same way, and on the government's dime. The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 offered 160 acres for a $10 filing fee to any homesteader who could prove up a working farm, on land taken from the Indigenous peoples who were already living on it. Under Interior Minister Clifford Sifton, Ottawa paid steamship lines a bonus for every settler delivered and negotiated cheaper fares, and annual immigration rose from 16,835 in 1896 to 141,465 by 1905. Sifton's ideal settler was not a wealthy investor. It was a "stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat," with "a stout wife and a half dozen children."²⁴ Canada did not charge the poor at the door. It paid them to come.

Not all of them were welcome once they arrived. When the First World War broke out, Canada interned 8,579 "enemy aliens," most of them Ukrainians who had come from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and forced some 80,000 more to carry identity papers and report to police. Internees were put to work on labour projects, including building Banff National Park.²⁵ The same park whose hotels and kitchens now run on temporary workers was built in part by immigrants Canada once treated as a threat.

Danielle Smith's own name comes out of this history. Records show her great-grandfather, Philipus Kolodnycky, arrived in Halifax in May 1913, listed as a "Ruthenian" from Austria. He became Philip Smith.²⁶ He was precisely the kind of newcomer Canada would label an enemy alien a year later. His great-granddaughter now governs the province.

None of these people was asked what they could pay. None was charged a premium for a doctor. They were welcomed because Canada needed hands, and they repaid that welcome many times over, in farms, railways, towns and generations of taxpayers. The difference between them and today's temporary workers is not poverty. Canada welcomed poverty by the shipload when it arrived from Europe. The difference is who is arriving now, and whether this Premier believes they deserve the same chance her own family was given.

A Small Country That Cannot Grow Its Own Workforce

History explains how Canada was built. Demographics explain why it still needs newcomers today.

Canada is the second-largest country on earth by area, and it has about 41.8 million people — roughly half of one per cent of the world's population.²⁷ It is not having enough children to replace itself. In 2024 the total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.25 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady, and Statistics Canada now counts Canada among the world's "ultra-low fertility" countries.²⁸ In the first three months of 2026 there were more deaths than births in Canada, and the population shrank.²⁹ As of this July, 20 per cent of Canadians are 65 or older, compared with 15 per cent who are under 15. In a single year the number of Canadians in their twenties fell by nearly 155,000.³⁰

Somebody has to do the work, pay the taxes, and staff the hospitals that an aging country depends on. For more than thirty years, that somebody has mostly been a newcomer:

The 1990s. Canada admitted 2.2 million immigrants between 1991 and 2000. Those who arrived during the decade accounted for about 70 per cent of Canada's net labour force growth from 1991 to 2001, and Statistics Canada projected at the time that the share would rise toward 100 per cent.³¹

The 2010s. Immigrants accounted for 84 per cent of the growth in Canada's labour force, including 55 per cent of the growth in high- and medium-skilled jobs, and they offset a decline in lower-skilled jobs held by Canadian-born workers. Over the same years the number of temporary foreign workers rose from 111,000 in 2000 to 777,000 in 2021. By 2019 they were 4 per cent of everyone earning a paycheque in Canada, and 15 per cent in agriculture.³²

2016 to 2021. Immigration accounted for 79.9 per cent of labour force growth. Immigrants now make up 23 per cent of Canada's population, more than 8.3 million people and the highest share since Confederation, and nearly two-thirds of recent arrivals are in their prime working years, 25 to 54. Statistics Canada says the country's working population "has never been older."³³

Put plainly, for three and a half decades most of the new workers Canada added came from somewhere else. Without them the workforce would have barely grown, and at a fertility rate of 1.25 it would now be shrinking. The pension cheques, the long-term care beds and the hospital shifts that the Premier's own voters rely on are paid for and staffed by the people she describes as a cost.

Alberta understands this better than anywhere. It was the fastest-growing province in the country over the past year, at 1.5 per cent, against 0.5 per cent nationally.³⁰ That growth is Alberta's economic advantage, and it comes from people moving here. A premier who treats it as a bill to be sent to the newest arrivals does not understand the country she lives in, let alone the province she runs.

A Footnote Canada Cannot Afford to Forget

Canada cannot thrive without immigration. The numbers settle that. The real question is who Canada should welcome, and the Premier's answer — people who can pay their own way — is one Canada has already tested.

For 28 years, the federal Immigrant Investor Program let wealthy applicants effectively buy permanent residency. In 2014, the Harper government shut it down. Its own assessment was blunt: "Most immigrant investors are not making a long-term positive economic contribution to Canada." They reported employment and investment income below Canadian averages. Over a 20-year career, an immigrant investor paid about $200,000 less in income tax than a federal skilled worker, and almost $100,000 less than a live-in caregiver. A survey found they had the lowest official-language ability of any immigrant category — including refugees.³⁴ Money at the door, it turned out, bought Canada very little.

Now look at the people who arrived with nothing. Among Canadians who came here as children between 1980 and 2000, 29 per cent of those whose parents were government-assisted refugees, and 32 per cent of those whose parents were privately sponsored refugees, went on to earn a university degree — compared with 24 per cent of people born in Canada to Canadian-born parents.³⁵ Refugees who have lived here 10 to 30 years are more likely to run their own business than Canadian-born workers, about 14 per cent against 12 per cent.³⁶ And between 2003 and 2013, immigrant-owned firms created 25 per cent of the net new jobs in the companies Statistics Canada studied, while making up only 17 per cent of them.³⁷

The lesson is simple. A bank balance is not a contribution. Money sitting in an account does not fill a shift, care for a patient, open a shop, or raise a child who becomes an engineer. A person who has fled a war, escaped poverty, or crossed an ocean so their children could have a better life has every reason to build, because there is nothing to go back to. Bring that person in, teach them the language, recognize or retrain their skills, put them to work, and they become a worker, a taxpayer, often an employer, and the parent of children who outperform the national average. That is an investment with a return. Someone who simply has money offers the country little beyond some tax revenue — and, by Ottawa's own count, less of that than a live-in caregiver pays.

A country with a fertility rate of 1.25 and a workforce that "has never been older" cannot afford to choose its newcomers by what is in their wallets. It has to choose them by what they are willing to build — and then help them build it.

So — Is She Qualified?

There are only two possibilities. Either Danielle Smith does not understand that the people she calls "guest workers" are filling jobs her own government recruited them for, in sectors her own immigration program prioritizes, while using a fraction of the health care the average Albertan does — or she understands all of it and is saying the opposite anyway. Put the two side by side.

Possibility one: She does not know. Look at what she would have to not know. She would have to not know that her $150 million counts only provincial tax, and that her own figures give a ratio of $6.67, not $10. She would have to not know that immigrants have accounted for most of Canada's labour force growth since 1990, or that the country now has more seniors than children and, in the first three months of this year, more deaths than births. She would have to have forgotten Alberta is Calling, her own letter asking Ottawa to double Alberta's immigration numbers, and the provincial program that turns temporary workers into permanent residents. She would have to not know that Canada already tried charging newcomers at the door, and apologized for it; that Canada already tried choosing newcomers by wealth, and cancelled it; and that her own great-grandfather arrived in 1913 as exactly the kind of newcomer Canada once treated with suspicion.

A qualified premier would know all of this. She would be asking how to get internationally trained nurses licensed faster, how to build the schools and housing a growing workforce needs, and how to turn the temporary workers already here into permanent Albertans sooner. She would not be asking how to bill them. If she truly does not know, she is unqualified to run a provincial economy, and no amount of confidence at a podium changes that.

Possibility two: She knows, and she is doing it on purpose. The record makes ignorance hard to believe. She signed the letter asking Ottawa for more newcomers.⁹ Her government ran the recruitment campaign and runs the nominee program. The head of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce told her, on stage and to her face, that the fee would hurt the businesses that depend on these workers.² Economists took her numbers apart in public.⁶ She has heard the other half of the ledger. She keeps reading only one half aloud.

So ask what the one-sided version buys her. It gives her someone to blame for crowded classrooms and a strained health system that her government has been in charge of for years — what Naheed Nenshi called blaming "immigrants for their own failures."¹⁴ It gives her a referendum to rally her base, on the same ballot as a separation question demanded by the wing of her party she needs to keep onside. And it speaks the same language as the audience she has cultivated on Breitbart and at Mar-a-Lago. None of that is governing. It is campaigning, paid for by the people least able to answer back. If this is the explanation, she is not unqualified. She is unfit, because a premier who knowingly misleads her province to turn it against the people staffing its care homes and farms has chosen politics over the people she was elected to serve. And in my view, it goes further than that. A premier who knowingly turns her province against the workers holding it up, while handing a ballot question to a movement courting a foreign government that talks openly of annexing us, is a traitor to Canada, to Alberta, and to the constituents who trusted her with the job.

Which is it? Only Danielle Smith knows for certain. But the first possibility requires believing that a former journalist and talk-radio host, now in her fourth year as premier, has never read her own letters. The second requires only believing that she is doing what her record says she does. Neither answer is good. The second is worse, because ignorance can be corrected with facts, and she has already been given the facts.

Albertans vote on October 19. They should vote knowing the whole ledger, not just the half the Premier chose to read aloud.