Alberta Premier Danielle Smith never misses an opportunity to trash Ottawa. Last Thursday, as part of her announcing some questions her government will offer on a referendum this fall, she blamed a bunch of our provinces’s problems on Justin Trudeau—of course—and on a new target for her ire, immigrants.

The politics is routine stuff. Few strategies for winning elections top convincing the masses of a scapegoat responsible for their problems who only you can protect them from. And for provincial politicians that scapegoat is often the federal government. But this is not the time for that choice. We have a real threat, a surprising and particularly powerful threat to the whole country, one we very much need to unite against.

Unfortunately Smith may not see Trump and his MAGA horde as a threat at all. She reflects an Alberta Americanism residual from two waves of immigrants that came up from the south, the first to take advantage of land, the second to take advantage of oil. And these immigrants did not represent a cross-section of America, but came from conservative parts of the country, MAGA-land one might say. I suspect the premier has some strong sympathies here. And what could be more MAGA than immigrant-bashing, the new scapegoats of the right.

Five of the nine questions proposed for her referendum deal with immigrants, with a particular bias against non-permanent newcomers, i.e. international students, temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers. The federal government has already acted to reduce the numbers of these groups. They currently make up about 5.5 percent of Alberta’s population, lower than the national average and falling. Focussing Albertans’ concerns on them with a referendum while presenting them as a cause of our problems in education, health care and other services is blatant scapegoating.

If our services have been overwhelmed by immigration, blame can hardly be lain at the feet of Justin Trudeau. A couple of years ago, his government wasn’t running ads in Ontario and BC under the slogan “Alberta is calling,” practically begging people to come to this province. Danielle Smith’s UCP was doing the calling.

And it wasn’t Justin Trudeau declaring his government looked forward to doubling the province’s population to 10 million people by 2050 and increasing the population of Red Deer ten-fold. That was Premier Danielle Smith.

The obvious question is why was a government that actively sought immigrants not planning for them? Why was it not preparing the facilities and institutions to provide for the rapidly growing population it was encouraging?

Is it that too many were the wrong kind? Bruce McAllister, head of the premier’s Calgary office, suggested as much with his comment, “Why import from nations with failed systems when our Judeo-Christian heritage and principles have worked so well here?” Or was Smith inspired by her good friend Tucker Carlson who warned us, in speaking engagements here a couple of years ago, that our federal government had imposed MAID to kill off native-born Canadians in order to replace them with immigrants?

In any case, Alberta is Calling appears to have been successful. I doubt, however, that those who answered the call could have imagined that the Alberta government would offer them up as scapegoats. Welcome to MAGA world.