David Knight Legg says Alberta is creating 80 per cent of Canada's new jobs and should take Quebec-style control of immigration
Albertans voted against leaving Canada but passed the referendum's immigration questions, and Premier Danielle Smith says her intention is to implement every one of those policies.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: a longform interview with David Knight Legg, who says Alberta's economy is running at full speed and that the province must act quickly on the immigration mandate voters gave it.
Speaking from Calgary, Knight Legg, who worked in the Alberta government after the NDP left office to make the province business-friendly again, described Alberta as "on fire," citing a $2.5 billion transaction that had just taken place in the oilpatch. The province has become an attractive place to invest, he said, by cutting taxes and red tape.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has talked about unlocking the regulatory constraints that keep Canada from building, he said, but is making "deep, fundamental mistakes" by aligning himself with places like the European Union. He named "the broken borders and the broken budget" as the two biggest themes working against Canada's economic development.
On the first of those, Alberta has already voted. Besides independence, voters faced nine other questions, most of them on immigration, and the immigration questions passed, some by a wide margin. Premier Danielle Smith was the star guest at a Rebel News Live event in Calgary. Asked on stage when she would start implementing them, Smith suggested Alberta would ask the Prime Minister for more money to handle the migrants.
In a clip from the event, she said that the day after the vote she told the Prime Minister that Alberta would prepare a proposal to take more control over economic migration, as Quebec has done since 1991. Quebec chooses 45,000 people and receives about $860 million in settlement-services funding. Alberta does not control how many people arrive. "I think we have 6,400," she said, yet 600,000 people came in the last five years, and about $150 million a year in settlement money goes to agencies rather than to the province.
Smith said she would be open-minded about other ways to defray the cost of social services, perhaps a federal transfer. Her intention, she added, is "to take the mandate that we've got and implement every single one of those policies."
Knight Legg had spoken a day earlier with former Premier Jason Kenney, who helped restructure Canadian immigration around skills-based entry. When the Conservatives left office in 2015, Knight Legg said, 15,000 asylum seekers were on a clear pathway. What he called asylum fraud has since moved to over 350,000, and Canada has lost track of 36,000 deportees, "mostly military age males."
The federal budget, he said, would add another 360,000 new entrants and make permanent residents of 200,000 people waiting in a broken system, "many of whom we know are frauds." Half a million people would be free to go wherever they want, and he expects them to choose Alberta "because Alberta is where the action is." The province is creating 80 per cent of all the new jobs in the country, he said, with only 14 per cent of its population.
For a model, he pointed to Singapore and Hong Kong, multi-ethnic and prosperous societies that vet newcomers and require them to prove themselves. The 1991 Canada-Quebec Accord on Immigration, he said, gives a province "a complete blueprint" for setting its own criteria. Without an Alberta card, he argued, a newcomer should not be able to walk into a classroom or jump the health-care queue ahead of people who have paid into the system.
An Alberta version of that accord, the two agreed, would solve 80 per cent of what they were discussing. Knight Legg said it would also reflect what a majority of Albertans voted for, even though they voted no on leaving Canada. Of those who voted not to leave, he said, 75 per cent voted for the immigration restrictions in the first five questions. Carney campaigned against the immigration questions, and they passed anyway.
On the budget, Knight Legg said Canada is heading for a national debt 300 per cent higher by 2030 than in 2015. The Liberal government borrowed more in its first nine years than all previous governments combined, he said, and Carney is spending more than Justin Trudeau had planned, with deficits on track to be twice Trudeau's by 2030 and interest already over $60 billion a year.
Canada, he noted, ranks last among the 40 most advanced economies in GDP growth, "in spite of Alberta's rocketship economy." The country does more business with Illinois than with the entire EU, and free trade with the United States, he argued, should be the No. 1 economic priority.
If Ottawa cannot handle immigration or the economy and wants to become "EU lite," he said, Alberta can start building an opportunity society in Edmonton and Calgary now. A few of his Sikh friends, he added, despise the lack of border controls and the extortion and trafficking rings that operate with impunity. The idea that such concern is racist, he said, "is actually the opposite."
GUEST: David Knight Legg. X: @KnightLegg.
COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-11-12 21:09:36 -0500 FlagOttawa won’t everr give Alberta autonomy. Danielle Smith is bamboozled by Carney and she isn’t fighting for our rights as much as she did a few years ago. Her tone has changed. Unless we can convince her to make a hard right turn and get back to the way she was, she could be looking for a new job next election.
