Naheed Nenshi has a problem with Danielle Smith’s referendum questions. On Wednesday’s Buffalo Roundtable, the panel had a problem with Nenshi.

In a clip played on the show, the Alberta NDP leader tore into the nine questions the premier’s government put to voters, claiming it spent $4 million urging a yes vote, “10 times more than anyone else spent,” on questions that “don’t even make any sense.”

“What is an Alberta-approved immigrant? That is not a thing that exists,” Nenshi said. Giving Albertans priority for jobs is unconstitutional, he argued, because Canadians have mobility rights. Two of the questions contradict each other, he said, and the whole package is “culture war garbage and scapegoating.”

Sheila Gunn Reid wasn’t buying it. “He’s a hard guy to listen to,” she said. “The condescension. It’s when he closes his eyes to talk to you like you’re just so stupid.”

On the jobs question, she said Nenshi knows exactly who the question is about and is pretending not to. “Do you think that we’re talking about Saskies? You think it’s guys in pickup trucks heading down the Number One Highway over into Alberta?” Nobody is worried about a worker from Fort St. John in Grande Prairie, the panel agreed. “We are worried about temporary residents coming here, taking jobs from our youth and then plugging their kids into our schools.”

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Guest Marty Belanger said the schools question is the one that lands. At last year’s UCP annual general meeting, he said, parents were telling him their straight-A kids couldn’t get a university spot because there was no room. “I’m not paying taxes to build a school to be a source of revenue. I’m paying taxes to build a school so I can educate my kids.”

None of that is anti-immigration, Belanger stressed. Canada ran a points system for decades that targeted the doctors, nurses and farmers the country was short of and made sure they spoke English. “We can’t let in two million in a year. We just can’t.” Smith, he said, is proposing “very reasonable stuff that we used to have.”

Gunn Reid pointed to an order paper question showing Ottawa waived health screening for roughly 1.5 million newcomers, and reminded viewers Albertans paid health premiums out of pocket until the mid-2000s. Somebody still pays, she said. It just comes out of your taxes now.

As for the 12-month wait for social services, the panel noted that private employers routinely put new hires on a one-year probation. Belanger pulled out his own example: an old British work visa stamped “not entitled to public services.” “So if I cut my finger while working in the UK, I went to the hospital and they fixed me, but then they’d give me a bill.”

“This brings us in line with other authoritarian far-right hellscapes in the world,” Gunn Reid said. “Like Australia.”

The Buffalo Roundtable airs weekdays at 11 a.m. MT / 1 p.m. ET.