Colin MacLeod is the author of the provocative book “The Case for Alberta’s Independence,” and the force behind @cnm5000 on X.For a unilingual Albertan, the shift in the 2026 Canadian immigration landscape represents a profound departure from the merit-based ideals once championed by the Express Entry system. Watching the current levels plan unfold is an exercise in pure frustration, as professional expertise and years of specialized experience are increasingly usurped by a single, politically charged factor: French language proficiency. In a province where only about 1.9% of the population identifies French as their mother tongue and over 95% of those individuals are already fully bilingual in English, the federal government’s obsession with Francophone immigration feels less like economic planning and more like a concession to Quebec’s linguistic priorities within Canada..BURTON: Mark Carney’s Davos pivot from globalization’s architect to its critic.The most glaring injustice is found in the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS), where an applicant receives a staggering 50-point bonus simply for speaking French. To an English-speaking professional, this weighting is fundamentally disproportionate; it is the ultimate "language tax" on merit. To earn an equivalent 50 points through other means, a candidate would need to jump from a Bachelor’s degree to a Ph.D. or secure an elusive formal job offer. This bonus is a massive, unfair advantage that allows a candidate’s ability to conjugate verbs to outweigh a Master’s degree in a STEM field. It signals that the government is prioritizing linguistic engineering over the immediate economic utility of an applicant’s professional skills, effectively devaluing the high-level human capital that Alberta actually needs.This bias is exacerbated by category-based selection, which has created a two-tier system where the "General" draws are a bottleneck for highly skilled Anglophones. While English-only applicants with perfect scores and high-demand skills are left languishing in the pool with CRS scores of 540 or higher, the government is holding exclusive "French-only" draws with scores as low as the high 300s. .This is not a "merit-based" system; it is a quota system. We are inviting people with lower overall qualifications simply because they fit a linguistic profile that is irrelevant to the Alberta job market. When an English-speaking engineer is rejected so that a lower-scoring French speaker can be fast-tracked, Alberta loses the talent it needs to keep its energy and tech sectors competitive. Furthermore, provinces like Ontario and New Brunswick are aggressively pursuing a 12% Francophone immigration target by 2029, a federal mandate that creates a systemic bias in Provincial Nominee Programs. .In the West, we see no economic data suggesting a "French-speaking labour shortage," yet we are forced to participate in a social experiment designed in Ottawa and fueled by Montreal. This policy forces provincial budgets to pivot toward French-language services and symbolic celebrations to justify these skewed immigration numbers, while unilingual English-speaking newcomers — who drive our real-world growth — compete for dwindling integration resources.The 2026 immigration plan is yet another betrayal of the economic engine of Western Canada. By elevating French proficiency to a status that overrides education, age, and technical experience, the federal government has sacrificed the "best and brightest" on the altar of linguistic quotas. .OLDCORN: If the NDP is a ‘Big Tent,’ why are radicals being shown the exit?.This is a deliberate sabotage of the meritocracy that built this country. Until the points system is purged of this blatant regional favouritism and rebalanced to prioritize professional utility, Canada will continue to hemorrhage top-tier global talent to competitors who actually value skill over the politics of the tongue. Alberta deserves an immigration policy that reflects its reality, not a federal handout to the linguistic demands of a distant province.Colin MacLeod is the author of the provocative book “The Case for Alberta’s Independence,” and the force behind @cnm5000 on X.
