EDMONTON — Premier Danielle Smith pushed back against Official Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi about temporary foreign workers on Wednesday, using Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan, an Alberta NDP supporter, to emphasize her point. Smith reiterated her stance on provincial immigration control during Question Period on Wednesday, reaffirming her desire to prioritize economic immigrants seeking permanent residency over temporary foreign workers with no long-term commitment to Canada. She has repeated this argument on multiple occasions following her address to Albertans on Thursday, in which she placed partial blame for Alberta's multi-billion-dollar deficit on poor federal immigration policies that have overwhelmed Alberta, while also deprioritizing economic immigrants. Her latest defence came with a twist, though, when she pushed back by quoting McGowan. ."Canada is a country built by immigrants, and that’s one of the things that has made us so successful,” McGowan wrote in a September 2025 press release.“But the TFW program is not real immigration: it’s an exploitative guest worker program that employers have used to drive down wages and replace Canadian workers with workers who are more compliant because they’re scared and desperate.”The irony of Smith quoting McGowan is two sided.McGowan is one of Smith's leading critics and also a large advocate of Nenshi and the NDP. He even ran for the NDP Leadership position in 2024.."Now that is a leader who's normally aligned with the folks on the other side of the aisle, but it just shows you how offside that they are with the general public, that they don't even agree with him," Smith said.McGowan has long been a critic of Canada's temporary foreign workers program, arguing that governments should focus on giving jobs to Albertans. Prior to Smith's trip to the United Arab Emirates in 2024 the AFL published a statement in which McGowan called it a "Temporary Foreign Worker recruitment trip." "It’s unacceptable that the UCP is aggressively recruiting Temporary Foreign Workers when so many Albertans are out of work and underpaid,” McGowan wrote in the press release. “There’s only one reason they would do this: to drive stagnating wages in our province even further down.”.Ironically, McGowan has heavily criticized Smith's decision to hold a referendum the province seeking greater control over immigration, so that, it claims, it can prioritize economic immigrants who are interested in making a commitment to Alberta and Canada."By my count, she’s going to inflict nine referendum questions on us (ten if she decides to add a question on separation to the mix)," McGowan posted on X shortly after Smith announced the referendum. "They’ll be questioning aimed and vilifying immigrants and denying them access to services."McGowan has yet to applaud Smith stating that she would like to deprioritize temporary foreign workers.
