Alberta Calling
Economic Geography

Alberta Calling

In the autumn of 2022, commuters riding the Toronto Transit Commission’s Line 2 Bloor–Danforth passed a billboard that had no interest in subtlety. Alberta is Calling, it announced, in block letters against an image of mountains and sky. The ad was funded by the Government of Alberta and authorised by Premier Jason Kenney. Its message was plain: your rent is too high, your taxes are too high, and we want you. Come west. We have jobs and we have houses and we have space.

Updated 45 min read

In the autumn of 2022, commuters riding the Toronto Transit Commission’s Line 2 Bloor–Danforth passed a billboard that had no interest in subtlety. Alberta is Calling, it announced, in block letters against an image of mountains and sky. The ad was funded by the Government of Alberta and authorised by Premier Jason Kenney. Its message was plain: your rent is too high, your taxes are too high, and we want you. Come west. We have jobs and we have houses and we have space.

The campaign worked. In the twelve months ending June 2023, Alberta recorded its largest single-year population increase in measured history — roughly 200,000 people, a number approaching the entire population of Lethbridge arriving in twelve months.1 The story that followed was more complex: housing markets strained under the weight of demand, rents spiked, Calgary’s rental vacancy rate fell below two percent, and the infrastructure of two major cities absorbed an expansion that their planning departments had not anticipated at that pace.

By 2025, some members of the same political coalition that ran Alberta is Calling were telling Albertans that the population surge was Ottawa’s fault — that the federal government had lost control of immigration, that foreign arrivals were straining services and inflating housing costs, and that the solution was federal restraint on admission targets. The disconnect between these two positions is not a matter of political interpretation. It is a matter of documented record.

This essay is about that record. It covers a decade of population data, the mechanics of who came to Alberta and why, the documented positions of the provincial government throughout the surge, the actual effects on housing and employment, and a comparison with Alberta’s provincial neighbours. It draws a structural comparison with a political strategy that has now been tested in several democracies. And it tries to do what the political discourse rarely does: trace the numbers back to their source.

Part A: A Province in Motion — The Population Decade

Alberta is a province of arrivals. Its demographic history is not a story of settled permanence but of repeated waves of in-migration driven by resource cycles — the homestead era, the Turner Valley oil discoveries, the Leduc strike of 1947, the National Energy Program backlash migration of the early 1980s, the oil sands expansion of the 2000s, and now the post-pandemic surge that is the subject of this essay.

Understanding the current moment requires the longer lens.

In 1975, Alberta’s population was approximately 1.8 million. By 1982, at the peak of the oil boom triggered by the 1973 OPEC embargo and sustained by the energy crises of the decade, it had reached 2.4 million — an increase of roughly 33% in seven years, driven almost entirely by interprovincial in-migration. Then the National Energy Program imposed federal price controls, the global oil price collapsed, and Alberta lost population between 1983 and 1986 as workers departed for Ontario and British Columbia.2 The province recovered through the late 1980s and 1990s, reaching 3 million by 2000 and accelerating through the oil sands expansion years.

By 2015, when this essay’s decade begins, Alberta had 4.1 million people. The oil price had collapsed from over $100 per barrel to below $50, Alberta was in recession, and for the first time in years the province was recording net out-migration to other provinces. The NDP government of Rachel Notley governed through the trough, and by 2019 the recovery had begun.

The UCP, under Jason Kenney, won the April 2019 election on a platform of economic renewal and pipeline advocacy. What followed was an economy that performed strongly — the oil price recovered, the oil sands produced at or near record levels, and Alberta entered the post-pandemic period with a labour market running well above capacity.

What happened between 2021 and 2024 is captured in Statistics Canada’s quarterly population estimates, which are among the most reliable datasets in Canadian public statistics.

The chart above makes the turning point unmistakable. In the 2015–2021 period, Alberta’s population grew modestly — approximately 30,000–80,000 per year — through a combination of natural increase, modest international immigration, and interprovincial flows that were sometimes negative. Then in 2022, both the international and interprovincial components accelerated simultaneously and dramatically. The twelve months ending June 2023 produced the 200,000-person increase already noted.3

Two things drove this. The first was the sustained post-pandemic labour shortage, which made Alberta’s employment-intensive economy — construction, energy, healthcare, trades — a powerful magnet. The second was the housing cost differential: in the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver, the average price of a detached home had crossed $1.1 million and $1.4 million respectively.4 An Alberta home, at a fraction of that price, looked like an investment opportunity even before factoring in the employment upside.

Both of these forces were known. Both were anticipated in provincial economic modelling. Both were, in material respects, engineered.

Part B: Who Came and Why

Alberta’s population surge had two distinct driver populations with different geographies, different timelines, and different political characterisations. The chart below makes the composition visible at a glance — two distinct streams, each with a different political ownership structure.

Flow width is proportional to estimated volume. Gold flows represent interprovincial migration — Canadians moving between provinces. Blue flows represent international arrivals by top source country. Both streams converged on Alberta simultaneously, at record volumes, because both were actively solicited.

Interprovincial migration — Canadians moving to Alberta from other provinces. This is the cleaner story politically, because the government ran an explicit campaign to produce it. Beginning in 2021 and accelerating through 2022–2023, Alberta became Canada’s top destination for interprovincial migrants. Statistics Canada’s estimates show that Alberta received net interprovincial in-migration of approximately 55,000 people in calendar year 2022 and 72,000 in 2023 — figures that are exceptional by historical standards and roughly equivalent to the entire population of St. Albert or Red Deer arriving in a single year.5

The source provinces were primarily Ontario and British Columbia. In Ontario’s case, the mechanism was housing: a family in Mississauga or Hamilton could sell their house, pocket the equity — often $400,000 to $700,000 after transaction costs — and purchase a comparable or larger home in Calgary with money left over. Alberta’s lack of a provincial sales tax added to the arithmetic. The Alberta is Calling billboard campaign was explicitly targeted at this cohort: workers with mobile skills and Ontario or BC addresses who were performing the same calculation and arriving at the same conclusion.

In British Columbia’s case, the mechanism was similar but amplified by the additional fact that BC’s housing markets had been expensive for longer. A skilled tradesperson who had arrived in Metro Vancouver from another country five years earlier and found ownership impossible was now discovering that moving to Calgary or Edmonton made ownership achievable. The province gained not only Ontario and BC people, but in some cases people who had moved to Ontario or BC from elsewhere and were now executing a second interprovincial move.

International immigration — people arriving from outside Canada. Canada set consecutive records for permanent resident admissions in 2022 and 2023: approximately 431,000 and 471,000 respectively, as the federal government implemented an accelerated post-pandemic immigration plan designed to address labour shortages and long-standing demographic pressures.6 Alberta received approximately 13–15% of total national admissions in each year, broadly consistent with its share of national population and GDP.

Additionally, international student admissions surged nationally — a separate policy category that proved to be among the most poorly managed elements of the overall immigration expansion. The number of study permits issued nationally rose from approximately 400,000 in 2019 to over 800,000 in 2023, bringing students who often arrived with insufficient support, were concentrated in urban centres with already-strained rental markets, and were sometimes enrolled in programs at institutions that bore little resemblance to the educational pathways the permit system was designed to support.7

The composition matters. The political discourse about immigration in Alberta does not consistently distinguish between permanent residents recruited through the Alberta Advantage Immigration Program, temporary foreign workers brought in to fill specific trades vacancies, international students admitted under federal targets, and refugee claimants processed under federal obligations. These are different populations with different policy levers, different economic profiles, and different provincial vs federal jurisdiction. Conflating them — which is a consistent feature of the political narrative — is what makes it possible to simultaneously run a provincial immigration recruitment program and blame the federal government for immigration outcomes.

The occupational profile of Alberta’s international immigration is instructive. In the provincial nominee stream — where Alberta has direct selection authority — the leading occupational categories throughout the UCP mandate included construction trades, healthcare workers (particularly nurses and personal support workers), oil and gas services technicians, and information technology professionals. These are the occupations where Alberta’s labour shortage was most acute, where the gap between available workers and available jobs was measured in tens of thousands, and where employers were actively lobbying the provincial government for faster processing and higher admission numbers.

Part C: The Government That Called

The Alberta is Calling campaign, launched in the fall of 2022 with a reported budget of approximately $2.5 million, was not an isolated initiative.8 It was the public-facing expression of a consistent provincial policy position that had been established and maintained by the UCP government since it took office in 2019.

The Alberta Advantage Immigration Program — the provincial nominee stream that gives Alberta direct authority to select immigrants with skills matching local needs — was expanded under the UCP government. The province’s annual provincial nominee allocation, negotiated with the federal government, increased from approximately 6,250 nominees in 2019 to over 9,500 by 2023.9 Provincial officials from the Ministry of Jobs, Economy and Northern Development attended immigration recruitment events in India, the Philippines, Mexico, and Nigeria. The Province of Alberta maintained a network of internationally-focused immigration streams including the Rural Renewal stream, the Dedicated Healthcare Pathway, and the Strategic Recruitment Stream — all administered and promoted by the UCP government.

The formal correspondence between the provincial and federal governments on immigration matters is part of the public record. Throughout the 2019–2023 period, the provincial government’s stated position, communicated through federal-provincial immigration policy meetings, submissions to the federal Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, and direct ministerial correspondence, was that Alberta needed more workers than current immigration targets allowed, that processing times were too slow, and that employer-driven streams should be accelerated.10

When the federal government announced its ambitious multi-year immigration plan — raising the target to 500,000 permanent resident admissions annually by 2025 — the UCP government did not object. Several provincial ministers issued statements welcoming the expanded targets and noting Alberta’s capacity to absorb skilled workers.

This is worth dwelling on, because it represents the complete inversion of the position that has since been articulated. The argument now being made — that the federal government’s immigration policy was excessive, uncontrolled, and responsible for Alberta’s housing and services pressures — comes from a government that spent four years formally requesting more immigration, operating an expanded provincial recruitment program, running a national billboard campaign inviting Canadians to relocate, and welcoming the federal targets that produced the outcomes it now characterises as a failure.

The Alberta Calling campaign in numbers. Launched October 2022 under Premier Jason Kenney, the campaign ran advertising in Toronto Transit Commission stations, on digital platforms targeted to Ontario and BC workers, and via a dedicated website at albertaiscalling.com. The province reported receiving over 200,000 unique visitors to the campaign site in its first month. The campaign featured testimonials from Albertans who had relocated from other provinces and emphasised three selling points: lower housing costs, no provincial income tax, and employment availability. It was, by any reasonable measure, a successful government-run migration recruitment operation. The province that ran it is now represented by some of the same politicians arguing that migration has gone too far.11

The provincial government’s position was not unique to Alberta in this period. Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe made similar statements about needing more workers and supporting expanded immigration. British Columbia’s government actively expanded its PNP nominations. The premiers of Ontario and Nova Scotia made public statements in support of higher federal immigration targets. The 2022–2023 immigration surge was not a unilateral federal decision imposed over provincial objection — it was, broadly, a policy direction that commanded provincial consensus at the time it was implemented.

Part D: The City of a Million Questions

The political geography of Alberta’s growth story is highly concentrated. Of the province’s approximately 800,000-person population increase over the past decade, the majority settled in the Calgary and Edmonton metropolitan regions, and within those regions, the story is primarily Calgary’s.

Calgary crossed the one-million person threshold in population during this period — a milestone that the city and province both celebrated publicly.12 The Calgary Metropolitan Region, which includes the city of Calgary and its suburban municipalities (Airdrie, Cochrane, Chestermere, Strathmore, Okotoks, and others), was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in Canada by absolute numbers in 2022 and 2023. The suburban rings of the region grew at rates that routinely exceeded 10% in a single year. Airdrie, north of Calgary, grew by approximately 15,000 people between 2021 and 2024 — a gain of roughly 23% on a base of 70,000.

Edmonton grew strongly but more moderately. The Edmonton Metropolitan Region added approximately 130,000 people over the decade — robust growth, but less concentrated and less visible than Calgary’s. Edmonton’s housing market, while not unaffected by the broader pressures, experienced somewhat less severe price and rent increases than Calgary, partly because Edmonton started from a higher supply base and partly because Calgary’s national profile as a destination was stronger.

The geographic specificity matters for an assessment of the political narrative. The claims being made about unaffordable housing, overwhelmed services, and insufficient infrastructure are overwhelmingly urban claims concentrated in Calgary. The communities making these claims — rural Alberta, smaller cities like Red Deer and Lethbridge — have experienced more modest growth without the same infrastructure pressures. But the political messaging is province-wide and federal-directed, when the actual policy levers that determine housing supply and municipal infrastructure are provincial and local.

Where the people are. Statistics Canada’s 2021 and 2024 population estimates show that 73% of Alberta’s population lives within the Calgary and Edmonton metropolitan regions. The growth of the past decade has made that proportion higher, not lower. The political conversations about immigration’s effects on community character and social cohesion that originate in rural Alberta are real — reflecting genuine demographic change in places like Brooks (home to the JBS Canada beef processing plant, which employs thousands of workers from over 70 countries) — but the housing affordability and infrastructure arguments are metropolitan, not provincial.

The schematic map positions Alberta cities by geographic coordinate. Bubble area represents estimated population gained between 2019 and 2024. The dominance of the Calgary–Airdrie corridor is decisive: the southern metropolitan region absorbed more growth than the rest of the province combined. Growth in Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, and Lethbridge was real but comparatively modest.

This southern concentration has a corollary for the political narrative. When rural MLAs speak about housing pressure and service strain attributed to immigration, they are describing a Calgary phenomenon using provincial rhetoric. The communities they represent — where agricultural and energy employment remains direct, where housing stock is available relative to demand, and where net migration is positive but manageable — are not experiencing the acute crisis they are invoking. The crisis is metropolitan. The policy response it requires is metropolitan. The government that holds the levers of that response sits in Edmonton.

Part E: Housing — A Supply Problem Wearing a Demand Mask

The most consequential misdiagnosis in Alberta’s current political discourse is the treatment of housing unaffordability as a demand problem when the evidence consistently identifies it as a supply problem.

Housing markets, like any market, respond to both supply and demand. When demand increases faster than supply, prices rise. When supply can increase freely and quickly, price spikes are temporary — the signal of rising prices induces more construction, which normalises prices over time. The reason housing prices in Calgary did not return to pre-boom levels as supply expanded is that supply could not expand freely or quickly enough to absorb the demand acceleration.

The price movements. The Calgary Real Estate Board’s benchmark price data — the most reliable measure because it controls for changes in the mix of properties sold — shows detached home benchmark prices rising from approximately $440,000 in early 2020 to over $650,000 by late 2023, an increase of nearly 50% in less than four years.13 Apartment benchmark prices nearly doubled over the same period, reflecting the flight to the last accessible entry point in the ownership market. Average rents tracked by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation rose by 30–40% between 2021 and 2024, with one-bedroom apartments in Calgary averaging over $2,000 per month by 2024 — a level that was genuinely unimaginable in the city five years earlier.14

These are real increases with real consequences for real families. They should not be minimised or dismissed. But explaining them requires understanding their origin, and their origin is not primarily demographic.

The supply deficit. The CMHC’s Housing Supply Report documents what happened to housing construction in Alberta in the years before demand accelerated. Housing starts in Alberta relative to population growth declined between 2016 and 2021 — a period when oil prices were recovering and population growth was modest. When demand surged in 2022, there was no inventory buffer. The construction pipeline takes two to four years to respond materially: land must be approved for development, servicing infrastructure must be extended, building permits must be issued, and tradespeople must be available to construct. None of these steps is fast, and all of them were constrained.

Calgary’s housing starts did increase substantially in 2022–2024 — a genuine supply response — but with a multi-year lag from the demand acceleration, and concentrated in apartment construction in areas that were already serviced rather than in the suburban greenfield expansion that would require new infrastructure investment.15 The City of Calgary’s development approval process, while faster than comparably sized Canadian cities, still averaged 12–18 months from development permit application to approval for new suburban subdivisions — a timeline that is structurally incompatible with absorbing a 200,000-person annual influx.

The zoning constraint. The single most important lever for housing supply in Calgary is zoning policy, which is a municipal responsibility subject to provincial oversight. The city of Calgary reformed its land use bylaw in 2022 to allow greater infill density in established neighbourhoods — a genuine and significant step — but the reform was partial and contested.16 Large areas of inner Calgary remain zoned for single-family detached development only. The missing middle — duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings — that might have expanded supply in established neighbourhoods faster than greenfield construction is still effectively prohibited in much of the city.

This is not an Ottawa problem. The Province of Alberta has the constitutional authority to mandate zoning reform in its municipalities, as British Columbia did in 2023 when the provincial government overrode municipal zoning restrictions to allow increased density near transit corridors across all BC municipalities.17 Alberta chose not to exercise that authority. The UCP government did not mandate density reform, did not accelerate development approvals, and did not create the financial mechanisms that might have brought private capital into missing-middle housing at scale.

The workforce paradox. The political claim that immigration drove housing costs up carries an internal contradiction that is rarely surfaced: the workers most needed to build new housing are, in Alberta’s labour market conditions, often immigrants. Construction and trades were among the top occupational categories in Alberta’s Provincial Nominee Program throughout the UCP mandate. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, concrete workers, and residential framers were recruited internationally because the domestic supply of trained tradespeople was insufficient to meet the demand generated by Alberta’s economic growth. Restricting immigration does not straightforwardly solve the housing supply problem — it removes supply-side labour at the same time it reduces demand-side pressure, and the net effect on prices is ambiguous.

Alberta’s housing costs in context. Even at the peak of Calgary’s price surge in 2023, the Calgary benchmark detached price of approximately $650,000 compared to Vancouver’s $1.43 million and Toronto’s $1.2 million.18 The crisis in Alberta is real — particularly for renters, first-time buyers, and workers in services and hospitality whose wages have not risen proportionally to housing costs — but it is not a crisis that originated with immigration. It is a crisis that originated with a housing supply pipeline that was inadequate to the province’s own economic ambitions, and that the provincial government had the tools and the time to address.

Part F: Work — What the Labour Market Actually Shows

The empirical claim that underlies the most politically resonant version of the immigration critique is the displacement hypothesis: that immigrants arriving in Alberta are occupying jobs that would otherwise be available to Albertans already here, driving up unemployment and suppressing wages.

The Alberta unemployment data from the period of maximum immigration intake does not support this claim at the provincial level.

Alberta’s unemployment rate peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic at approximately 15.5% in May 2020, then declined steadily as the economy reopened and the energy sector recovered. By mid-2022 — at the beginning of the peak immigration period — Alberta’s unemployment rate was approximately 5.5%, which was below the national average of 5.8%.19 Through 2022 and 2023, as the province received record interprovincial and international migrants, unemployment continued to fall, reaching approximately 5.2% in early 2023. Alberta’s labour market was not absorbing migrants into unemployment — it was absorbing migrants into jobs that could not otherwise be filled.

The Alberta construction sector, to take the most relevant case, faced vacancy rates — the share of jobs that employers actively sought to fill but could not — that were among the highest in any major sector through 2022. The sector added approximately 25,000 jobs between 2021 and 2023 while still reporting persistent vacancies. This is not a labour market being displaced by immigration; it is a labour market that needed immigration to function at the level of output the broader economy required.20

Healthcare tells a similar story. Alberta Health Services reported nursing vacancy rates of 11–14% in acute care settings through 2022 and 2023 — vacancies that contributed to emergency room closures, surgical wait time extensions, and measurable deterioration in care outcomes. The provincial government actively recruited internationally trained nurses, and some of Alberta’s international immigration intake during this period consisted of healthcare professionals arriving through specifically designed pathways.21 The political claim that this immigration harmed Albertans would require demonstrating that those nursing positions would have been filled domestically absent the immigration — and the evidence does not support that claim.

The distributional question — whether immigration suppresses wages in specific occupational categories, even if the overall unemployment effect is neutral or positive — is more nuanced and deserves a careful answer. Economic research on this question is not unanimous, but the majority of credible studies find that immigration has a small negative effect on wages for workers in direct occupational competition and a positive effect on wages for workers in complementary occupations.22 In Alberta’s labour market conditions — tight, with strong demand across most sectors — the conditions for significant wage suppression by immigration are not present. A structural labour shortage suppresses the wage-suppression effect: when employers have difficulty filling vacancies at any wage, adding workers does not necessarily push wages down.

Part F.5: The Shape of Who Arrived — And What It Costs

The aggregate labour market numbers tell one story. The demographic profile of arrivals tells another — one with different implications, not for employment, but for the public services that a growing population puts pressure on.

The concentration of migrants in the 25–34 prime working-age band is the dominant feature of this chart. International arrivals are even more concentrated in youth: the modal age for international migrants is 25–34, with a substantial cohort in the 15–24 band. The share aged 65 and over — Alberta’s highest per-capita health expenditure group — is negligible.

This chart contains a fiscal argument that rarely surfaces in the political debate about immigration’s costs. The arrivals of 2022–2024 are, by demographic profile, the least expensive cohort you could add to a provincial health system and the most productive you could add to a tax base. Young workers in the 25–34 band pay income tax, GST, and property tax through their landlords; they use hospital beds at low rates; they do not draw on elder care or long-term care. In the actuarial language of public finance, this wave of migration improved Alberta’s long-term fiscal balance sheet.23

What the same age profile did generate was pressure on two specific systems: schools and emergency rooms. The families who arrived interprovincially — typically a couple in their early 30s, with young children or with children arriving shortly after — landed in the Calgary and Edmonton suburbs and immediately registered those children in schools that were already absorbing growth.

Alberta K–12 enrollment grew approximately 13% from 2019 to 2024 — a pace that has outrun the construction of permanent school space. Emergency room 90th-percentile wait times have risen across the province, driven by a combination of population growth, deferred pandemic-era care, and a healthcare staffing shortage that predates the recent migration surge.24

The school overcrowding that Calgary and Edmonton parents describe — portable classrooms in parking lots, new school applications submitted for buildings not yet approved — reflects a capital planning system that was not sized for the growth the province’s own policies produced. Alberta’s school capital funding formula had not been revised to accommodate migration-driven demand until it was already behind. The emergency room pressures reflect a staffing shortage and a primary care deficit that predated the migration surge and would exist at lower severity without it.

Both pressures are genuine. Both have the same root cause — insufficient investment in service supply relative to a population growth rate the province had actively sought to produce. And neither is solved, even in theory, by reducing immigration. The school-age children arrived as part of the families of working-age adults. Telling those adults not to come would have left the jobs unfilled, not the classrooms empty. And the elderly Albertans whose health needs are actually driving emergency room pressure — the population cohort aged 65 to 84, which is growing faster than provincial health capital has kept pace with — were already here.

Part G: Two Neighbours, Two Responses

Alberta shares a border with British Columbia to the west and Saskatchewan to the east. All three provinces have used immigration as a labour force tool for decades. The divergence in how that tool is discussed politically in 2024–2025 is not explained by different economic outcomes.

British Columbia has long been Canada’s primary immigrant destination after Ontario. Metro Vancouver in particular has received large cohorts from across Asia — Hong Kong, mainland China, the Philippines, South Korea, India — over five decades, and the city’s cultural composition reflects that history visibly. BC’s Provincial Nominee Program is among the most established in the country. The provincial government — under both the NDP and the earlier BC Liberal (now Conservative) administrations — has consistently supported immigration as a structural feature of BC’s economy.

BC experienced significant housing pressure throughout this period — greater than Alberta’s in absolute terms, because BC’s supply constraints are more severe and its starting prices were already much higher. Metro Vancouver’s detached benchmark price reached $2.1 million at its 2023 peak. The political response in BC was not to target immigration but to target housing supply: the provincial government under Premier David Eby implemented sweeping zoning reform in 2023, mandating increased density near transit and in municipalities across the province, and created financial mechanisms to support non-market housing.25 The policy debate in BC has been about supply, not about people.

Saskatchewan provides perhaps the sharpest contrast to Alberta’s current political posture. The Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program (SINP) has operated for over two decades and is foundational to the province’s growth strategy — particularly in agricultural and food-processing industries. The province’s population grew from approximately 1.13 million in 2015 to around 1.22 million by 2024, with immigration contributing substantially to that increase. The premier during much of this period, Scott Moe of the Saskatchewan Party (a conservative government that has governed without interruption since 2007), has maintained a consistent and public pro-immigration position, framing immigration as essential to rural Saskatchewan’s economic survival.26

Saskatoon and Regina have experienced housing pressure as their populations have grown, with benchmark prices rising and vacancy rates tightening. The political conversation in Saskatchewan about this pressure has not featured the immigration blame narrative that has become prominent in Alberta’s public discourse. It is not that the economic pressures are absent — they are present and documentable — but that the political choice to weaponise demographic anxiety against the federal government has not been made in the same way.

The difference between Alberta and Saskatchewan is not economic. It is political. It is a choice about whether rising costs are attributed to supply constraints and provincial policy — where the responsibility is closer to home — or to demographic change and federal policy — where the responsibility can be directed outward.

Part H: The Blueprint — When Growth Becomes a Grievance

There is a recognisable political pattern in what Alberta is experiencing, and it has been run in enough democracies to have a documented anatomy.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 is the most thoroughly documented recent example. The UK had experienced significant in-migration from Eastern Europe following EU enlargement in 2004 — a migration flow that the Blair government had facilitated and that successive governments had maintained. By 2016, approximately 3 million EU citizens lived in the UK, contributing substantially to construction, healthcare, agriculture, and hospitality. The UK labour market absorbed this migration with broadly positive effects on aggregate output and mixed effects on wages in specific sectors, particularly for low-skilled native workers in areas of high EU migrant concentration.27

The Vote Leave campaign converted legitimate distributional concerns — the fact that the gains from migration accreted primarily to employers and highly skilled workers, while some low-wage workers in specific geographies faced genuine wage compression — into a generalised demographic blame narrative. The slogan was “take back control,” and its target was the movement of people. The policy response it implied — reduce immigration — was not well-matched to the distributional problem, which was better addressed by fiscal policy, regional investment, and wage policy. But it was more emotionally compelling than those alternatives, and it worked.

Post-Brexit Britain is now a detailed case study in the consequences. Labour shortages in agriculture became acute within two years of the January 2021 end of freedom of movement — crops left in fields, livestock sent to slaughter early for want of abattoir workers, production costs elevated permanently.28 The NHS nursing crisis, which had been building for years, worsened sharply: EU nurses left in disproportionate numbers, and the replacement pipeline from non-EU countries was slower and more expensive to establish. The construction sector’s labour shortage constrained housing supply at precisely the moment that housing demand reforms were intended to stimulate it. Food price inflation ran above the general rate for over two years. None of this proves that Brexit caused these outcomes in isolation — multiple factors were at play — but the specific sectors most damaged were the ones most dependent on the EU migration that was curtailed.

The structural template. The pattern has consistent features. A government facilitates or permits a demographic shift that serves economic interests. The costs of that shift — housing pressure, competition for services, changes in community character — fall disproportionately on specific geographies and specific segments of the population. The political response does not address the policy levers that would ameliorate the costs (housing supply investment, service infrastructure expansion, wage policy) but instead identifies the people who arrived as the problem. The federal government — in Westminster and in Ottawa — becomes the designated responsible party, regardless of the actual allocation of policy authority. The provincial or local government that holds the levers that would actually address the problem escapes accountability by directing anger outward.

The parallel to Alberta is not exact. Alberta’s situation involves a different constitutional structure, a different policy history, and a different economic context. But the structural template — government creates the conditions, benefits from them, redirects anger about the consequences toward a federal target, and proposes a solution that would harm the economy it claims to be protecting — is recognisable.

What makes Alberta’s version particularly striking is the brevity of the time between the calling and the blaming. The Alberta is Calling billboard was in Toronto subway stations in October 2022. By 2025, senior figures in the same political movement were characterising the results of that campaign as a federal failure. The gap between those two positions is not a matter of changed circumstances. It is a matter of who is paying attention.

Part I: What the Data Actually Recommends

The honest reading of Alberta’s demographic and economic data over the past decade produces conclusions that are not particularly complicated, even if they are politically inconvenient.

Alberta grew because its economy performed, and its economy performed because of the combination of resource revenues, tax policy, and a labour force that was assembled from across Canada and the world in response to explicit signals from the provincial government. The growth produced pressure on infrastructure — housing, transportation, services — that was predictable and predicted, and that the provincial government had both the responsibility and the tools to address by investing in supply.

The housing crisis is real and its costs are falling on real people. First-time buyers in Calgary face a market that has moved materially beyond their reach in four years. Renters face vacancy rates and rent levels that represent a genuine deterioration in living standards for the lower third of the income distribution. Service workers in hospitality, retail, and childcare earn wages that do not accommodate Calgary’s current rental costs.

These people deserve a serious policy response. The serious policy response involves:

Housing supply: Sustained investment in zoning reform, development approval streamlining, and non-market housing production. The Province of Alberta has the authority to mandate density near transit and in urban areas, as BC has demonstrated. It has not exercised that authority.

Infrastructure investment: Municipalities that absorbed population growth faster than their fiscal capacity allows need provincial and federal infrastructure transfers. The federal Housing Accelerator Fund, which provides incentive payments to municipalities that demonstrate supply-enabling reforms, has been a genuine positive. The provincial government’s engagement with that program has been mixed.

Wage policy: The minimum wage in Alberta is currently $15 per hour — below the Living Wage for Calgary, which was estimated at over $23 per hour in 2024.29 Housing affordability for the lowest earners is not principally a housing problem; it is a wage problem in which housing costs have made the insufficiency of the minimum wage acute.

Immigration management: The federal government’s 2022–2023 international student surge was genuinely poorly managed, creating supply in the education sector without adequate support for students and concentrating arrivals in housing markets that could not absorb them. This is a legitimate criticism of federal policy. But it is a criticism that is best addressed by improving the management of immigration pathways, not by reducing the overall level of immigration that Alberta’s economy has demonstrated it can use.

None of this analysis supports the conclusion that fewer people should have come to Alberta. More people coming to Alberta is what Alberta asked for and what Alberta’s economy needed. The conclusion that the data supports is that Alberta should have built more houses.

Conclusion: The Calling Has a Return Address

The Alberta is Calling billboard is not running anymore. The political conditions that made it feel like a statement of confidence have changed, or been changed, and the province is now engaged in a different kind of conversation about what happened when everyone showed up.

That conversation is happening in the wrong direction. It is being directed at the federal government’s immigration policy, at the cultural characteristics of who came, at the demographic change in established neighbourhoods, at the strain on services that is real but whose cause is not primarily demographic. It is not being directed at the decade of housing underinvestment that left the province without a supply buffer when demand accelerated. It is not being directed at the provincial zoning policy that constrained density in the cities that grew fastest. It is not being directed at the political actors who ran the billboard, expanded the provincial nominee program, sent officials to immigration fairs in Manila and Mumbai, and formally requested higher federal immigration targets.

The people who came to Alberta came in response to specific signals, many of them deliberate and government-funded. The construction trades worker from the Philippines who arrived through the Alberta Advantage Immigration Program came because an Alberta employer needed her skills and the provincial government invited her. The family from Mississauga that sold their house and bought in Cochrane came because the provincial government ran an advertising campaign in their subway station telling them to. The nurse from Nigeria who filled a vacancy at Foothills Medical Centre came through a provincial healthcare recruitment pathway that the provincial government designed and maintained.

None of these people deserve to bear the political cost of a housing policy failure that preceded their arrival. None of them should be the vessel into which the government that invited them pours the frustration it should be directing at its own record.

Alberta’s population story of the past decade is not a story of things that happened to the province against its will. It is a story of things the province chose — actively, expensively, and publicly — and of a political class that has not yet found the vocabulary to accept the consequences of its own choices.

The calling was theirs. The return address is clear.

References

Official Statistics and Government Data

Alberta Education. Student and School Statistics. Annual series, 2019–2024. Edmonton: Government of Alberta.

Alberta Health Services. Provincial Health System Accountability Report. Quarterly series, 2019–2024. Edmonton: AHS.

Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB). Benchmark Price Statistics. Monthly series. Calgary: CREB, 2015–2024.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Housing Supply Report: Second Edition. Ottawa: CMHC, 2024.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Rental Market Report: Calgary Census Metropolitan Area. Ottawa: CMHC, October 2023.

Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). National Price Map. Ottawa: CREA, Q4 2022 and December 2023.

City of Calgary. Land Use Bylaw 1P2007 Amendments. Calgary: City of Calgary, 2022.

City of Calgary. Population and Housing Census. Calgary: City of Calgary, April 2023.

Government of Alberta. Alberta Advantage Immigration Program: Annual Allocation Data, 2019–2023. Edmonton: Ministry of Jobs, Economy and Northern Development.

Government of Alberta. Dedicated Healthcare Pathway Program Summary. Edmonton: Ministry of Jobs, Economy and Northern Development, 2022–2023.

Government of British Columbia. Homes for People Action Plan. Victoria: Province of British Columbia, 2023.

Government of British Columbia. Housing Supply Act. Victoria: Province of British Columbia, 2022.

Government of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program: Annual Report. Regina: Government of Saskatchewan, 2019–2024.

House of Commons, Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (CIMM). Evidence Records. Ottawa: Parliament of Canada, 2020–2023.

House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Labour Shortages in the Food and Farming Sector. First Report of Session 2021–22. London: House of Commons, 2022.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration. Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2022 and 2023.

Statistics Canada. Components of Population Growth, Annual (Provinces and Territories). Table 17-10-0020-01. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.

Statistics Canada. Interprovincial Migration by Age Group. Table 17-10-0045-01. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.

Statistics Canada. Labour Force Survey Estimates, Monthly (Seasonally Adjusted). Table 14-10-0287-01. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.

Statistics Canada. Migrant Age Characteristics by Province. Table 98-10-0372-01. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population.

Statistics Canada. Population Estimates, Quarterly (Seasonally Adjusted). Table 17-10-0009-01. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.

Statistics Canada. Population and Age Distribution. Table 98-10-0379-01. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population.

Statistics Canada. Job Vacancy and Wage Survey. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2022.

Travel Alberta / Government of Alberta. Alberta is Calling Campaign: Communications Release. Edmonton: Government of Alberta, November 2022.

UK Migration Advisory Committee. EEA Migration in the UK: Final Report. London: Migration Advisory Committee, September 2018.

Academic and Research Literature

Alberta Living Wage Network. Living Wage Rates for Alberta Communities, 2024. Edmonton: Alberta Living Wage Network, 2024.

Dustmann, C. and Frattini, T. (2014). ‘The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK.’ Economic Journal, 124(580): F593–F643.

Dustmann, C., Frattini, T. and Preston, I. (2013). ‘The Effect of Immigration along the Distribution of Wages.’ Review of Economic Studies, 80(1): 145–173.

Javdani, M. and Pendakur, K. (2014). ‘Fiscal Effects of Immigration in Canada.’ Journal of International Migration and Integration, 15(4): 777–797.

Peri, G. (2016). ‘Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets.’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(4): 3–30.

  1. Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0009-01: Population estimates, quarterly (seasonally adjusted). The year ending June 2023 saw an increase of approximately 200,600 — the largest annual gain in Alberta’s recorded history. For context, Lethbridge’s 2021 census population was approximately 101,000. ↩

  2. The National Energy Program, introduced by the Trudeau federal government in October 1980, imposed a price ceiling on Alberta oil well below international market prices and introduced a windfall profits tax on petroleum production. The program is estimated to have transferred approximately $60 billion from Alberta to federal coffers over its lifetime and is the founding grievance of modern Alberta alienation. Population loss in 1984–1986 was measurable: Statistics Canada estimates show Alberta declining from approximately 2.45 million in 1982 to 2.40 million by 1986. ↩

  3. Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0020-01: Components of population growth, annual (provinces and territories). The interprovincial in-migration component for Alberta in calendar 2023 is estimated at approximately 72,000 net; international immigration contributed approximately 105,000. These are orders of magnitude rather than precise figures pending final reconciliation. ↩

  4. Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), National Price Map, Q4 2022. Greater Toronto Area composite benchmark: $1,102,000. Greater Vancouver composite benchmark: $1,384,000. These figures represent the benchmark at the approximate time of peak Alberta is Calling campaign activity. ↩

  5. Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0020-01. Net interprovincial migration to Alberta: approximately −18,000 in 2015 (out-migration during oil bust), recovering through 2019–2020, then +55,000 in 2022 and +72,000 in 2023. Historical context: the previous record for net interprovincial in-migration to Alberta was set during the 1970s oil boom. ↩

  6. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, 2022 and 2023. Canada admitted 431,645 permanent residents in 2022 and 471,771 in 2023, against a target range of 401,000–447,500 and 447,000–494,000 respectively. ↩

  7. IRCC Study Permit data; Statistics Canada postsecondary enrollment estimates. The surge in international study permit issuance from approximately 400,000 in 2019 to over 800,000 in 2023 was acknowledged by the federal government to have exceeded capacity planning, leading to the 2024 reforms that capped post-secondary student enrollment at publicly funded institutions and introduced income requirements for permit holders. ↩

  8. The $2.5 million figure was reported by CBC News in December 2022 based on Treasury Board records. The campaign ran on TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) platforms and digital channels and was administered through Travel Alberta with provincial economic development ministry oversight. ↩

  9. Government of Alberta, Ministry of Jobs, Economy and Northern Development, Provincial Nominee Program data. The AAIP annual allocation increased from 6,250 in 2019 to 9,750 by 2023, representing among the fastest proportional growth of any provincial program. Alberta’s per capita allocation among provinces grew from below-average to above-average during the UCP mandate. ↩

  10. Government of Canada, House of Commons, Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (CIMM), evidence record, various sessions 2020–2023. Alberta ministry officials testified before the committee on multiple occasions requesting faster processing, expanded TFW access, and higher provincial nominee allocations. The formal correspondence between the provincial and federal governments on immigration targets is subject to FOI provisions but consistent positions were stated publicly. ↩

  11. Data on albertaiscalling.com traffic was reported by the Government of Alberta in a November 2022 communications release. The campaign’s creative and media buying was handled by a Calgary-based agency under provincial contract. ↩

  12. City of Calgary, Population and Housing Census, April 2023. The city’s self-conducted biennial census recorded a population of 1,336,000 within city limits — formally confirming the million-person threshold had been crossed since the 2021 federal census. ↩

  13. Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB), Benchmark Price Statistics, monthly series. The CREB benchmark price, which controls for changes in property mix by tracking prices of representative properties within defined property classes, is the most appropriate price measure for apples-to-apples comparisons over time. ↩

  14. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Rental Market Report: Calgary Census Metropolitan Area, October 2023. Average monthly rent for a purpose-built apartment across all bedroom types reached $1,981 in October 2023, with two-bedroom units averaging $2,287. ↩

  15. CMHC, Housing Supply Report, Second Edition 2024. The report assessed Calgary’s housing supply gap — the difference between starts that occurred and starts needed to restore affordability — at approximately 100,000 units over a 10-year horizon, with the gap widening most sharply in 2022–2023. ↩

  16. City of Calgary, Land Use Bylaw 1P2007 amendments, 2022. The city’s blanket rezoning initiative, which came into effect in June 2024 after extensive public consultation, allowed secondary suites as of right across most residential zones — a significant reform but applied after the peak of the demand surge. ↩

  17. Government of British Columbia, Homes for People Action Plan, 2023. The BC Homes for People legislation required all municipalities to allow a minimum of four units per lot on single-family residential land and mandated transit-oriented development zones of 800 metres around all rapid transit stations. The legislation came into force in June 2024. ↩

  18. CREA Benchmark Prices, December 2023: Calgary $657,500; Vancouver $1,431,400; Toronto $1,082,200. ↩

  19. Statistics Canada, Table 14-10-0287-01: Labour Force Survey estimates (monthly, seasonally adjusted). Alberta unemployment: 5.5% in July 2022 vs national 5.8%. By January 2023: Alberta 5.3% vs national 5.1% — convergence driven partly by Alberta’s employment growth. ↩

  20. Statistics Canada, Job Vacancy and Wage Survey (JVWS). Alberta construction sector vacancy rates 2022: approximately 6.8%, representing roughly 14,500 unfilled positions at any given time. ↩

  21. Government of Alberta, Dedicated Healthcare Pathway — launched 2022, targeting internationally trained nurses, paramedics, and other regulated health professionals with Alberta job offers. Approximately 2,400 healthcare workers were nominated through provincial pathways in 2022–2023. ↩

  22. Peri, G. (2016). ‘Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets.’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(4): 3–30. See also: Dustmann, C., Frattini, T., and Preston, I. (2013). ‘The Effect of Immigration along the Distribution of Wages.’ Review of Economic Studies, 80(1): 145–173. The weight of research finds small negative effects on native wages in direct competition, offset by positive effects from complementarity and productivity gains from larger labour markets. ↩

  23. Statistics Canada, Table 98-10-0372-01 (migrant age characteristics by province) and Table 17-10-0045-01 (interprovincial migration by age group). Alberta 2021 Census age distribution from Table 98-10-0379-01. The fiscal implications of young-skewed migration are well-documented; see Javdani, M. and Pendakur, K. (2014), ‘Fiscal Effects of Immigration in Canada,’ Journal of International Migration and Integration, 15(4): 777–797. The dominant finding across fiscal impact studies is that economic migrants in their 20s and 30s generate net fiscal surpluses over their working lifetimes, substantially exceeding their lifecycle public service consumption. ↩

  24. Alberta Education, Student and School Statistics, annual series 2019–2024. Alberta K–12 enrollment figures are compiled annually and published by the Ministry of Education. Emergency room wait time data: Alberta Health Services, Provincial Health System Accountability Report, quarterly 90th-percentile time to physician initial assessment. The 90th-percentile metric captures the experience of the longer-waiting portion of ER patients and is the standard benchmark used by Alberta Health Services for system performance monitoring. Wait times reflect patients who remained in the system; left-without-being-seen (LWBS) rates, which also rose during this period, represent additional unmet demand not captured in the headline figure. ↩

  25. Province of British Columbia, Homes for People legislation (2023) and Housing Supply Act (2022). BC’s transit-oriented development mandate and blanket upzoning are among the most aggressive housing supply interventions by any Canadian province. ↩

  26. Government of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program (SINP), annual reports 2019–2024. Premier Scott Moe’s public statements on immigration, including at the 2023 Council of the Federation, consistently characterised immigration as essential to Saskatchewan’s rural economic model. ↩

  27. Dustmann, C. and Frattini, T. (2014). ‘The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK.’ Economic Journal, 124(580): F593–F643. The UK Migration Advisory Committee’s 2018 report on EEA migration concluded that EU migration had broadly positive fiscal and aggregate economic effects, with distributional impacts concentrated among certain low-skill, low-wage segments. ↩

  28. House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Labour Shortages in the Food and Farming Sector, First Report of Session 2021–2022. The report documented losses of approximately £60 million in unharvested crops in 2021 due to labour shortages, with the pig farming sector forced to slaughter approximately 120,000 healthy animals for want of abattoir processing capacity. ↩

  29. Alberta Living Wage Network, Living Wage Rates for Alberta Communities, 2024. The living wage for Calgary — defined as the hourly wage at which a family of four with two full-time earners can meet basic needs without government subsidy — was calculated at $23.45 per hour in 2024. Alberta’s statutory minimum wage is $15.00 per hour. ↩

References