Vital Role of Immigrants

Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Loffreda’s Inquiry No. 12, calling the attention of the Senate to the vital role that immigrants have played in shaping Canada’s economic growth.

It would be easy for me to stand here as an Alberta senator and talk about the long history of the utterly essential roles that immigrants have played in the economy of my province, from the first fur traders and pioneer settlers through to the present day. However, that would be far too easy because Alberta stands at a critical inflection point. For my province, this is a time of reckoning, as our own government has embarked on a scurrilous smear campaign designed to scapegoat recent immigrants for Alberta’s chronic planning failures and to incite a backlash against new Canadians. The leadership of my province has invented an imaginary immigration crisis — a crisis that simply does not exist. It has crafted five noxious referendum questions — questions that no one in Alberta asked for — to better convince ordinary Albertans that their newcomer neighbours are some kind of social or economic threat.

These questions are confusing on purpose. They are designed to create some kind of anti-immigrant hysteria and whip up a fervour of resentment against the very people Alberta needs to grow, prosper and thrive: workers, skilled professionals, investors, entrepreneurs, academics and artists. The questions are strategically designed to create an impression that immigrants, international students and temporary foreign workers are somehow stealing jobs and social services from “real Albertans.” They propose to reduce the number of immigrants allowed into Alberta. They propose things such as denying education and health care to legal residents of the province until they have lived in Alberta for a full year, meaning that children of refugees and new arrivals will be robbed of their chance to go to public school. They create an utterly false impression that non-citizens are somehow voting illegally in provincial elections. The moral and the socially divisive implications of all of this are deeply disturbing.

Right now, in the spirit of Senator Loffreda’s inquiry, I’m going to speak specifically to the economic risks of this kind of populist rabble-rousing. I want to thank Senator Loffreda for providing me with this timely opportunity so close to the October 19 referendum.

In this moment of existential crisis for the future of my province and my country, I want to call on any and all Alberta voters who happen across this speech online to defeat these questions, which are both socially toxic and fiscally disastrous.

First, let it be said that Alberta is not in the midst of some economic crisis or malaise. Thanks to high oil prices, the province is booming. The government is on track to post a budget surplus of at least $2 billion. GDP is on track to be the highest in the country. Many of Alberta’s key export sectors have been pretty well insulated from the full import of Trump’s new tariffs. The result is that we actually have a labour shortfall in the province.

Despite having the highest employment rate in the country, Alberta has about 63,000 jobs sitting vacant. That means many employers are unable to find the workers they need, whether they are looking for convenience store clerks, construction workers, pharmacists, packing plant staff or software engineers.

The problem is particularly acute in rural areas, especially in the north of the province. I hear anecdotal reports all the time of restaurants that have had to severely limit their hours because they simply cannot find staff. There is a crying shortage of medical professionals in rural communities. Many of those towns rely on immigrant doctors, nurses, lab techs and health care aides to keep their local hospitals and extended care facilities open.

Nor is Alberta facing an immigration crisis. There simply is no flood of newcomers overwhelming public services. In the first quarter of 2026, Alberta actually saw negative immigration. Immigrants still arrived, but even more left, a net loss of 648 people. In the second quarter, there were 10,770 net international migrants to Alberta. That was still a 37.5% decrease from the second quarter of the previous year.

Overall, Alberta’s population grew by just 1.52% last year. That was the lowest growth rate since 2021, during the COVID pandemic. Indeed, the last time Alberta’s population had such low growth was in 2016, during a major crash in world oil prices.

So, this immigration crisis? It’s imaginary.

But even if Albertans do manage to resist Danielle Smith’s efforts to scapegoat and bamboozle, even if these xenophobic referendum questions fail, the damage will already have been done. By presenting itself to the world as an insular and intolerant province, we are chasing away the very workers, academics, investors, inventors, creators and entrepreneurs we need to continue to grow and prosper, the newcomers who don’t just fuel our economy but enrich our communities and culture. It is so perverse and self-destructive.

Since the very first day the University of Alberta opened, the province’s universities have relied on immigrant professors and graduate students to teach and research. Today, our major research universities need international doctoral and post-doctoral students if they hope to stay at the cutting edge of medical, scientific and technological innovation. These are the people we need to boost our high-tech start-up sectors, the innovators who are turning academic research into new enterprises that, in turn, attract investment and create new jobs in engineering, biomedical research, AI, high-tech agriculture, et cetera.

According to the Alberta Enterprise Corporation, 14% of all technology start-ups in Alberta have a new or very recent immigrant as their founder. Almost 40% of Alberta’s tech founders come from visible minority backgrounds. By pandering to anti-migrant populism, we run the risk that newcomers won’t choose Alberta. We also run the risk that long-settled immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants will opt to leave a province that no longer feels welcoming, inclusive or even safe.

Meanwhile, at a time when international investors wary of the unpredictability of Trump’s America are looking to Canada as a stable place to invest, Alberta is chasing away potential overseas investment in real time by purposefully creating uncertainty about our future in Canada.

What more are we risking? Well, immigrant entrepreneurs are the backbone of the small-business economy. Over 36% of small- and medium-sized businesses in Alberta with paid staff are immigrant-owned. That’s well above the national average of 23.7%. Indeed, 65% of business owners with paid staff in Alberta’s food and beverage sectors are immigrants.

Think about where you live. Think about the small businesses that make a community vibrant and exciting and that make people want to live in a particular municipality or neighbourhood. Think about the number of newcomers who open restaurants, bakeries and butcher shops, or operate food trucks, introducing us all to diverse new cuisines and making our cities more cosmopolitan and delicious. Think about the new arrivals who open their own cobbler or tailor shops, corner stores, nail salons or pharmacies, making our lives so much more convenient and our neighbourhoods so much more walkable.

In major cities, immigrant entrepreneurs play a vital role in the cycle of urban renewal, breathing life back into aging strip malls and once-vacant main street storefronts. They are perhaps even more essential in smaller, more rural communities, where one or two new immigrant businesses may make all the difference between life and death for the economy and the vitality of an aging Prairie town.

Without immigrants and without temporary foreign workers, international students and people on temporary work visas, Alberta’s economy risks stagnation. Where will we find the workers to build new pipelines, power lines, new homes, data centres and to staff daycare centres? Where will we find the people to develop our biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, to harvest our vegetables, perform our surgeries, conduct our symphonies and deliver our packages?

We can’t let the anti-immigrant, anti-migrant rhetoric of the toxic Trump regime colonize our imaginations and trick us into thinking that Alberta has an immigration problem when it doesn’t. We can’t let fear and prejudice overwhelm common sense and enlightened self-interest.

Thank you again, Senator Loffreda, for allowing me this opportunity.

Thank you, hiy hiy and mahsi’cho to all the thousands and thousands of Albertans from across the political spectrum and from every kind of community who are mobilizing and fighting now to protect the reputation, the social cohesion and, yes, the economy of the province we so love and which I am so proud to represent in this chamber.