Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally were unpersuasive in their arguments for sorting people by citizenship.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
The Alberta government on Monday announced that it will start adding what is known as a citizenship marker to driver’s licences next fall when people renew their permits or apply for a new one.
The letters CAN – indicating the holder is a certified Canadian citizen – will appear on licences and on the provincial identification cards issued to people who don’t drive. As well, the new cards will carry the holder’s Alberta health-care registration number.
On the surface, this seems like a practical idea: an all-in-one government card that could eliminate the need for most Albertans to carry multiple IDs in their wallets. If only the government had left it at that.
Instead, Premier Danielle Smith and Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally offered strained and unpersuasive reasons for sorting people by citizenship (licences issued to permanent residents and refugees will have no notation, immediately identifying them as non-citizens).
They seemed to be looking for problems to justify a solution they were determined to impose.
Alberta adding proof of citizenship to driver’s licences, other ID
Premier Smith, for instance, said the marker was being added to prevent non-citizens from voting in elections. As of the 2023 Alberta general election, Albertans have had to provide proof of identity and address at polling stations – as is required in federal elections.
But that is not the same as proof of citizenship. Canada and many other democracies avoid enforcing such a requirement in order not to disenfranchise people who don’t have a passport, citizenship certificate or birth certificate.
More importantly, voter fraud is so rare in Canada as to be insignificant. There is no evidence-based argument for using markers to prevent what doesn’t exist for the most part.
Ms. Smith and Mr. Nally also leaned on the fact that there are 530,000 more registered health-care numbers in Alberta than there are people. This is a big discrepancy but, as the Premier said, it could be due to people dying, or to people leaving the province without notifying authorities.
Mr. Nally ominously called the excess numbers “fake ones” but neither he nor his boss offered evidence of medicare fraud. Even if there were, how citizenship markers would fix it is muddy, given that health care is available to permanent residents and refugees. The addition of health registration numbers alone would seem adequate.
When pressed by journalists, Mr. Nally resorted to saying the issue was “non-controversial,” because 67 other countries do it. He gave Spain, Italy, Japan and Brazil as examples.
The 67 number is hard to pin down. In fact, relatively few countries (Brazil is one) include citizenship on driver’s licences, limiting them instead to proof of identity, residence and the right to drive. Spain, Italy and Japan do not appear to be among those that do.
What Spain, Italy and other EU countries do include on licences is place of birth, which serves as an additional data point for confirming a person’s identity. But place of birth alone is not considered legal proof of citizenship; that requires a passport or national ID card.
These thin justifications might not be so eye-catching had the Smith government not suggested recently that, because of high immigration in recent years, the province might “withhold provincial social programs to any non-citizen or non-permanent resident who does not have an Alberta-approved immigration status.”
When asked about this at the announcement of the citizenship markers, Ms. Smith did not deny the two things could be connected. The government will “have to see on a going-forward basis” whether there are other ways the new cards could be used, she said.
Given the lack of a cohesive justification for the markers, it is reasonable to worry that Alberta’s move is a populist tactic playing to fears about election integrity and non-citizens accessing benefits they don’t deserve.
It is also concerning that, in a time when Canadians think immigration rates have been too high, permanent residents and refugees are being asked to carry IDs that will identify them to landlords, bouncers, police officers and others as non-citizens.
Mr. Nally said Tuesday that, “because we live in Canada, there will be no discrimination.” We’d like to believe that, too. We’d prefer it, though, if Alberta wasn’t proposing to create a handy tool to do just that.