Governing by Referendum

Populism trumps good policymaking

Dear Reader,

I’d like to tell you that my two-week vacation offered an excuse to unplug and refresh. Alberta politics stand still for no one, however, and my mind remained fixated on our province’s drift away from liberal democracy. This long-form essay is my attempt to make sense of these latest developments, including the UCP’s continued infatuation with governing by referendum.

Photo by stefan moertl on Unsplash

TL;DR:

• Smith’s “government-by-referendum” isn’t some form of democratic renaissance. It’s part of a broader populist strategy that deliberately sidesteps the checks & balances, compromise, and accountability inherent in pluralism.

• Albertans aren’t choosing the agenda or the framing; Smith is, prioritizing immigration/constitutional fights over what most people actually care about.

• The mega-ballot of 9+ questions in October 2026 will further polarize the province. Without a concerted, pro-pluralist response, the vote will leave Alberta harder to govern and democracy even thinner than before.

The Populist Pattern

As I’ve written extensively before, Premier Danielle Smith has been signalling a new governing strategy in Alberta. Populism has replaced pluralism as the dominant mode of governance, eroding liberal-democratic norms by removing checks and balances on the premier’s power.

On the surface, Smith’s recent conversion to government-by-referendum seems to buck this trend. After all, what could be more “democratic” than letting “the people” decide on matters of public policy?

This is flawed thinking.

First and foremost, “the people” aren’t deciding which topics are prioritized and how the issues are framed. If they were, polls suggest Albertans would prefer to vote on issues like healthcare, the economy, education, and affordability -- all of which they feel the UCP is bungling.

Immigration and constitutional amendments are nowhere near the top of the public’s agenda. And yet, Smith is tabling a slate of questions on those topics this fall.

Second, Smith’s use of referendums is motivated not by an altruistic commitment to direct democracy. Rather, it is strategic and highly politicized -- designed to hold her party’s divergent factions together by dividing them from the rest of the province.

This will have serious ramifications for her ability to govern Alberta once the dust settles this fall.

How did we get here, and what does it mean for the future of democracy in Alberta and Canada?

Throughout 2025, Smith’s government changed laws to make citizen-initiated referendums easier to trigger. This opened the door to a referendum on Alberta independence. Alongside that ballot, the premier has announced no fewer than nine (9) other referendum questions will be put to Albertans in October 2026. This one exercise will feature more referendums in one day than the rest of Alberta history combined.

Taking the Easy Route

As a governing strategy -- using referendums as a pressure valve, a bargaining chip, or a substitute for hard choices -- Smith’s approach flies in the face of pluralist policymaking. Rather than bringing many voices to bear in a consensus-building process, referendums shrink democracy to its thinnest form: one question, one side wins, one side loses.

By contrast, pluralism starts by accepting stubborn facts of modern life: we seldom agree, there are many sides to complex issues, and majorities are hard to construct as a result. In other words, society is made up of many competing groups with legitimate differences. We disagree over values, interests, identities, and lived experiences. Good policy is therefore messier, often involving well-considered tradeoffs and elite accommodation.

In that world, pluralists don’t seek a single, obvious, commonsense “public interest.” For them, politics consists of continuously negotiating a contested, constantly-evolving common good. That means policy outcomes rarely satisfy the wants of any one group, but they can be accepted by all as legitimate if the process is fair, flexible, accountable, and constrained by checks and balances that prevent any one faction from dominating in perpetuity.

Populism, by contrast, frames politics as “the people” versus “a corrupt elite.” It treats the public interest as self-evident, and it locates that truth in the leader who claims to embody “real people.” In this way, populists tend to favour minimum winning coalitions over the broader common good. They use referendums as such: strategically-framing questions so as to manufacture outcomes that favour 50% +1.

Just as the policy cycle idealizes the pluralist approach to public policy -- with its commitment to public engagement, expert opinion, deliberation, and evaluation -- referendums are the epitome of populist policymaking. There is no need for legislative debate or scrutiny by the courts when the leader picks a question and lets the people decide (emphasis intended).

In this sense, referendums sit uneasily with pluralistic principles that demand meaningful citizen engagement and clear accountability. They are crude instruments, offering elected officials a tempting escape hatch: “Don’t blame us: the people chose.” Instead of the government, they place responsibility at the feet of a faceless majority, often at the expense of voiceless minorities. By their very binary nature, referendums divide citizens rather than bring them together around workable solutions.

Convenience and Strategy

Canada’s own history is instructive. We’ve occasionally used referendums to engage citizens on foundational, long-term questions like military conscription and secession, the sort that ought to require explicit popular consent. But those cases are rare for a reason. Referendums are by definition divisive affairs with little room for the sort of negotiation and nuance required in pluralist societies.

More commonly, populist governments like Smith’s reach for referendums out of convenience or strategy.

Convenience referendums can end deadlock inside a governing party or cabinet. Instead of doing the pluralistic work of persuading colleagues, negotiating trade-offs, and taking responsibility, leaders offload the conflict onto voters. Danielle Smith’s referendum questions about the role of immigrants in Alberta society appear to fit this bill.

Strategic referendums, meanwhile, are often designed to produce “leverage” -- to strengthen a leader’s hand in negotiations with other governments. Like Jason Kenney’s referendum on the equalization principle, many of Smith’s constitutional referendum questions are strategic in nature: designed not to achieve actual outcomes (those would require the federal government to agree to cede jurisdiction, which is unfathomable), but to gin up more distrust in a “corrupt elite” outside the province’s borders.

But strategic referendums often carry unintended consequences. Just ask Kenney or David Cameron, whose attempts to provide a safety valve for the expression of populist grievances within their own parties ended up emboldening the very far-right forces that ousted them. On the eve of his departure, Kenney remarked that the “lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.” He neglected to note that he handed them the key by dabbling in populism.

Kenney’s referendum also shows that, once you open the door to province-wide votes as routine instruments of governance and intergovernmental relations, you normalize high-stakes, identity-laden campaigning as a way to move policy. You incentivize actors to simplify, polarize, and engage in disinformation rather than build consensus and ensure the greatest good for the greatest number.

And -- after the policy decision is made -- you make it harder, not easier, to govern a pluralist society where any durable solution must be continually negotiated across an even more divided populace.

The Hard Work of Pluralism

By comparison, pluralism depends on institutions that force politics to be more than a shouting match between 50-plus-one and everyone else. When they are functioning well, legislatures and caucuses compel public reasoning, compromise, and accountability. Independent officers and courts protect rights and constrain arbitrary power. Federalism requires negotiation across jurisdictions.

Navigating these checks and balances takes patience, time, effort, and diplomacy. Populists like Smith frame these brakes as obstacles to “the people’s will.”

Pluralism asks a lot more of our leaders than populism does. It asks them to do the hard work: to negotiate, to build consensus and buy-in, to explain trade-offs honestly, and to accept blame when decisions are unpopular if necessary. In a diverse province, and a diverse federation, that is the job of each premier.

The irony is: if Danielle Smith is successful in gaining the leverage she seeks through her nine referendums (and counting), she will still need to do the hard work of implementing the things she’s promised. That will mean building the very consensus to pass laws and achieve unanimous consent among all ten provinces and the federal government that she’s currently avoiding -- or, worse yet, making all but impossible through her actions and rhetoric.

Worse yet, if Smith fails to deliver, those who voted “yes” on her 9+ questions may turn to avenues beyond direct democracy to achieve the ends she’s promised them.

So where does this leave us?

The Paths Ahead

In the coming months, the growing batch of referendum questions will pit Albertans against each other. This polarization could cleave along the conventional lines of left vs right, NDP vs UCP, or progressive vs conservative. That’s certainly in the premier’s best interests, as it would help to hold her party together internally.

But these ideological-partisan dividing lines don’t align well with the questions at hand. Particularly the one on separation.

Like moderates and centrists, progressives and conservatives alike see value in immigrants’ contributions to Alberta’s society and economy. They are also suspicious of xenophobic scapegoating and attempts to tear apart Confederation.

In other words, the vast majority of Albertans -- from all sides of the political spectrum -- are pluralists. This puts them at odds with the populists who might vote “yes” in Smith’s referendum package.

These pluralists have several options.

1. They can sit out the referendums out of principle, hoping that a low voter turnout will dissuade Smith from pursuing any of her proposed policies or strategies for lack of a firm mandate.

2. Alternatively, pluralists can sit by passively while populists dominate the referendum campaigns. Whether out of complacency or apathy, they can allow things to play out as they will, choosing to participate (or not) in the eventual votes.

3. Or pluralists can mount their own “no” campaigns -- either separately or in unison. The former will result in a cacophony of voices, each of which may resonate with a different segment of the population. A unified campaign would require coordination and a willingness to put aside traditional ideological and partisan differences.

Either way, pluralists should avoid treating these votes as a normal exercise in democracy. This referendum package is not simply an isolated effort to secure consent on a policy agenda or leverage in some game of constitutional cosplay.

It is a referendum on an approach to governance -- a way to manufacture legitimacy while dodging the institutions that test ideas, protect rights, and force compromise.

If Albertans reward that method with a string of “yes” votes, they will not be “taking back control” from elites. They will be handing more control to a premier who gets to draft an even longer list of future questions, set the timing, and avoid blame or claim ownership of the outcomes, all while ignoring or shirking responsibility for the conflicts and consequences that will inevitably follow.

The real question, then, is not which boxes Albertans will tick on the historically-long ballot, but whether they are willing to defend the democratic habits that make disagreement livable: deliberation, restraint, and accountability.

If Smith insists on making October 2026 direct democracy month, Albertans can make it a referendum on how we want to govern ourselves. “Yes” supports the populist shortcut of dividing “the people” into winners and losers and calling that democracy.

A “no” vote is an endorsement of the shared rules and mutual respect that have made our province the most prosperous in Canada and our country, the envy of many others across the globe.