Could the influx of new Albertans affect voting in Edmonton ridings this election?
Voting behaviour is individualized, says the U of A's Jared Wesley
After moving to Edmonton two years ago, Kieran Ramnarine will be voting federally for the first time as an Albertan.
He's stressed ahead of the April 28 election, though, because the stakes seem higher than in previous votes.
"With threats to democracy, and then seeing this political and social charge behind politics in general these days, it just feels like there's more impact behind my vote, and my vote is going to lead to something much more tangible in the future," he said in an interview.
"Picking what that might be is going to be tough."
The Edmonton census metropolitan area — which includes the city and satellite communities like Leduc and Sherwood Park — has grown by more than 159,000 since 2021, when the last federal election was held, Statistics Canada data shows.
The record increase has been driven mainly by an influx of migrants, like Ramnarine, who arrived from other countries and from other provinces — especially B.C. and Ontario.
Federal electoral district boundaries, including several Edmonton area ridings, were redrawn in 2023 to adjust for growth.
The changes led to Edmonton's nine electoral districts being within the city's limits. The St. Albert-Edmonton riding, for example, no longer exists; the redrawing separated St. Albert from the city's northwest, forming the new St. Albert-Sturgeon River and Edmonton Northwest ridings.
Edmonton Mill Woods has also been split into two new ridings: Edmonton Southeast and Edmonton Gateway.
StatsCan used 2021 census data to calculate population and demographic information for each new riding, but the numbers aren't available yet for how much the population counts in those ridings have changed in the past four years.
Elections Canada recently analyzed how the 2021 election could have played out with the 2023 ridings.
But according to Jared Wesley, a University of Alberta political scientist, it's unclear whether migrants to Alberta will have any impact on the upcoming election.
"There is no real sense that an influx of people is going to have a real impact on one riding or another," he said.
Historically, Alberta mostly votes conservative in federal elections. In 2021, 30 of 34 ridings in the province went to the Conservative Party. Six of the nine Edmonton-area ridings went blue.
Some migrants may come from places with more political parity, but voting behaviour is so individualized and people come to Alberta for many different reasons, Wesley said.
"Some of them are attracted to the small-c conservative values of entrepreneurialism, free markets and small government," he said.
"Folks move here for other reasons as well. They might be drawn here because of quality-of-life factors, or robust systems of public support or social services.
"It really depends on who we're talking about — and those folks tend to scatter across ridings fairly randomly."
To properly track the potential impact of newcomers, researchers would have to study people before they moved, where they came from and where they landed in Alberta, he said. In this case, that work would take months after the election.
Danyal Niro, born and raised in Calgary, was first eligible to cast a ballot in the 2015 election. He did so in the Calgary Shepard riding, he said.
Niro, who has since moved within and outside of Alberta, expects migrants could have an impact in ridings in the cores of Alberta's major cities, he said.
"The vast majority of these migrations are going into the city centres, which are typically the more diverse battleground ridings that exist here," said Niro, who now lives in Beaumont, southeast of Edmonton.
The political preference in Niro's riding — the new Leduc-Wetaskiwin electoral district, south of Edmonton — is more set "and doesn't seem to be moving anytime soon," he said. Under its previous name, Edmonton-Wetaskiwin, the riding has been held by Conservative MP Mike Lake since 2015.
For Ramnarine, the Edmonton newcomer, the lead-up to the election has been a learning experience: people he has had conversations with are learning more about Ontario politics from him, while he is learning more about the Alberta landscape from them, he said.
"People are getting a wider perspective and that's changing their impressions of who to vote for in the next election," Ramnarine said.
Voters don't often cast ballots based on a party's policy platform, said Wesley. Instead, they tend to focus on things like identity and how they — or even their parents — voted in the past, he said.
Policy could have even less influence this election, partially because the parties' platforms have many similar initiatives, he said.
But this election, in particular, Wesley expects voters will focus more on which leader they most trust can take on U.S. President Donald Trump, who has imposed tariffs on some Canadian imports and has said repeatedly that he wants to make Canada the 51st state.