2025 Canadian election - one-seat ridings of Edmonton-Gateway and Edm-Southeast offer little leeway for voters (Millwoods Mosaic, April 2025)

(slightly-larger version of the article published in Millwoods Mosaic)

As the 2025 election approaches, we see that parts of Millwoods have now been placed in two separate ridings, Edmonton Gateway and Edmonton Southeast, and that six candidates are running in each of them. It is expected that former MPs Amerjeet Sohi and Tim Uppal will do well. 

But surprises can happen. For one thing, those two candidates have never run in those exact ridings before, and big changes have occurred since the last election. Justin Trudeau is no longer PM; Donald Trump is now in the White House. With the recent trade war, the outcome of the elections both in local riding contests and overall is very much unknown. And the election system we use is making the election results very much open to unknown factors.

With the new districting, the west part of Millwoods is in the new riding of Edmonton Gateway where it is grouped with others outside Millwoods. The east part of Millwoods and The Meadows are now in Edmonton Southeast. 

These two new ridings contain different groupings of voters as compared to city wards and provincial electoral districts. But as arbitrary as these ridings are, voters in the riding cannot vote for anyone running elsewhere even if they prefer them to the candidates in the riding.

The other restriction is if a voter in Edmonton-Gateway wants to vote for the Conservative party, he must vote for Tim Uppal, just as a for-instance. Same for the Liberal party and Jeremy Hoefsloot. There is no other choice - only one candidate for each party.

While in election systems used in many countries elsewhere, a district elects several members, each party puts up a slate of several candidates, and the voter has a choice of candidates even while knowing the party they want to support.

As well, when each party runs just one candidate in each riding, generally historically that one candidate has been a man. This partly explains why women have been so under-represented in Canada’s governments. This election is no exception - of the 12 candidates running in Edm-Gateway and Edm-Southeast, only four are women, two of which are the two NDP candidates.

Because each riding elects just one MP, some voters look at the candidates running in their riding and assess which two are most likely to be elected and then place their vote on the one that they dislike the least. This is called strategic voting, and the idea is to have the best chance for the vote to actually count.

Besides Sohi and Uppal, ten other candidates are running in the two ridings. The outcome is unknown but it seems they might have little hope, so why are they running? 

Because elections are about more than just filling empty seats in the House of Commons. An election is an opportunity for voters to say whom they want to see elected. It is just our bad luck that our election system is set up so voters must choose whether to self-censor themselves to get the best chance for their vote to actually count, or to vote for whom they truthfully most want to see elected.

This quandary is created because the election system uses some of the votes cast in each riding to elect the MP and ignores the rest. But in each riding, candidates of a variety of parties - for the Conservative, the Liberals, the NDP, the People’s Party, the Communist Party - are on the ballot so voters can show their true sentiments, whether it counts or not. 

Some independent-minded candidates are even running under their own steam. The election allows this to happen because each voter casts their vote for a candidate, not for a party. The party label is used just for identification. 

A candidate will be elected in each riding depending just on one question - does he or she have more votes than any other candidate within that riding? It does not matter how many votes he or she has - perhaps 70 percent, or 40 percent, or 24 percent, or even fewer of the votes cast. As long as no other candidate has more votes, they will be elected. This means MPs are elected with very different numbers of votes, and overall parties receive disproportionate numbers of seats compared to their overall vote tallies. 

Even if Sohi receives 60 percent of the votes in Edmonton Southeast, perhaps 20 percent more than his nearest competitor, there is no way for those extra votes to go to help Jeremy Hoefsloot, the Liberal candidate in Edm-Gateway. Each riding is a separate sub-battle, and there is no mechanism to achieve overall fairness.

For Millwoods voters, the first question is which of two ridings do you find yourself in?

Edmonton-Gateway or Edmonton-Southeast.

The choices you are offered at least party-wise are similar in each. Each of the ridings has one Conservative, one Liberal, one NDP, and one People's Party candidate. In Edm-Southeast, Corinne Joy Benson is running for the Communist Party. Edm-Gateway has two Independent candidates; Edm-Southeast has one. 

If a voter knows what party he or she wants to support, there is no choice as to whom to vote for  - that party only has one candidate on offer in each riding.

In Edm-Gateway, Tim Uppal is the Conservative candidate. He was MP for the now-disbanded riding of Edmonton Millwoods from 2019 to the present. In 2021 he was elected by just 38 percent of the votes cast, barely more than a third of the votes. He may or may not be more popular in the new riding of Edm-Gateway.

Jagsharan Singh Mahal is the Conservative candidate in  Edm-Southeast.

The Liberal Party of Canada is running a candidate in each riding. In the last election, Edmonton elected a Liberal MP (in Edmonton Centre), so a Liberal being elected in Edmonton can happen. However, it does not matter how many Edmontonians vote Liberal. Whether or not the Liberal candidate will be elected in a riding is solely determined by whether or not in that riding, a geographical area covering just one-ninth of the city, the largest group of voters votes Liberal. The election of Edmonton's nine MPs  are derived by nine different sub-battles, each one separate from the others. There is no mechanism to achieve overall fairness.

Amarjeet Sohi is the Liberal candidate in Edmonton Southeast. He was Millwood’s MP and recently served as Edmonton mayor. Jeremy Hoefsloot  is the Liberal candidate in Edm-Gateway.

Madeline Mayes is the NDP candidate in Edm-Gateway; Harpreet Grewal is the NDP candidate in Edm-Southeast. The NDP currently hold two federal seats in Edmonton and holds every provincial seat in the city. However due to each riding being its own battle, the possibility of success for these two candidates in the 2025 federal election really comes down to just how votes are cast in the riding itself. 

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is pushing the idea that Canadians are tired of both the Liberals and the Conservative and the way they alternate in power. The two-party contest - Liberal versus Conservatives, Conservative versus Liberals - is mostly caused by the winner-take-all election system that we use. Singh has in the past spoken in favour of switching to a more fair election system. Certainly the NDP have consistently been under-represented in the House of Commons if we compare its share of seats to its share of the votes cast.

For the last 70 years, all the seats in Edmonton have mostly been filled by Conservatives, but Liberals and the NDP have also had successes. The only exceptions to that three-party pattern were the elections of right-wing MPs under the labels Reform and Alliance 30 years ago.

But even with this historical pattern, candidates of other parties and candidates of no identified party label are running in Gateway and Southeast. Perhaps they hope for a lucky break or simply want to provide an opportunity for voters to truthfully record their election hopes. 

In Edm-Southeast, Martin Schuetza is running for the People’s Party; in Edm-Gateway Paul McCormack is running for that party. McCormack was the People’s Party candidate in Edm-Millwoods in 2021 as well. The People's Party in 2021 took almost five percent of the votes cast across Canada so was due about 19 seats but received none.

In Edm-Southeast, Corinne Joy Benson is running for the Communist Party. The Communist Party of Canada, which was formed a hundred years ago, last elected an MP in Canada back in 1945.

The two ridings also have Independent candidates: Rod Loyola and Ashok Patel in Edm-Gateway, and Gurleen Chandi,  in Edmonton Southeast.

Rod Loyola served as an NDP MLA from 2015 until he resigned to run as a Liberal in Edmonton Southwest. However, a minor scandal blew up when it was found that back in 2009 he had seemingly endorsed two Palestinian organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, who the Canadian government identifies as terrorist organizations. The Liberal party dropped him as a candidate but he has registered to run with a party label in Edmonton-Gateway, a different riding. His switch of ridings demonstrates the rule that you do not need to live in the riding to run as a candidate there!  (This is unlike the rule that voters can only vote in the riding where they live.)

Due to the election system we use, for Loyola (or any other candidate) to be elected, he would need to take more votes in the riding than any other candidate. That may depend as much on how the boundaries are drawn as on the candidate’s popularity with Edmontonians. But, if we had city-wide fair elections, all a candidate would need to be elected is to have about ten percent of the vote across the city, likely a much easier job.

The country of Ireland uses multi-member districts to elect its MPs, and Independents are elected quite often because the election system does not waste votes as much as the Canadian election system does. Independents have better chances because they run in a wider district where perhaps their dispersed voter base can show itself.

Because of our election system, the last time an Independent MP was elected in Edmonton was … well never. The closest we came was  David Kilgour, Millwoods’ MP from 2004 to 2006. He was elected as a Conservative and as a Liberal but later sat as an Independent. 

Multi-seat districts do a good job of representing the voters. If each riding elects several members and each voter has just one vote, then a large proportion of votes are used to elect the winners, which is only fair.

This fairness is strongly pronounced if the voters have ability to cast ranked votes, where if the vote is at first placed on someone who is un-electable, the vote may be transferred to others. The Single Transferable Voting election system allows that freedom to the voter. The voter does not have to vote strategically against the most-hated of the expected front-runners but can vote for whom he or she truly wants to see elected.

Larger multi-member districts would give more fairness than our one-seat districts.

And Edmonton used to use multi-member districts.

Back in the 1920s, Edmonton used the whole city as a district, to elect five provincial MLAs and 12 city councillors. When the number of MLAs in Edmonton went up to 7, there was no need to carve out new arbitrary districts. Instead the whole city simply continued to be used as the district, the difference being it now elected seven! The same district was used for 30 years.

But with our present one-MP districts, each time Alberta is given an additional seat in the House of Commons, at least some of the districts have to be re-drawn. 

As the days before the election get fewer, I suggest talking to your friends and neighbours. Perhaps they are not voting the way you expect. Investigate the policies of each of the candidates running in your riding. Many of them have websites explaining their positions, and the positions of the parties they represent.

In this election each voter has a choice. For some, the way to vote is clear, based on strong party affection. For others though, the choice may be whether to vote for the least-bad option or to vote for whom they truly want to see elected, even if that person appears not to have a chance. It is up to each person to decide the best course of action. 

And by the time the next issue of the Millwoods Mosaic is sent out, the election results will be known. Hopefully most voters in Millwoods and The Meadows will be satisfied by results.

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(housekeeping: https://montopedia.wixsite.com/montopedia/post/2025-canadian-election-one-seat-ridings-of-edmonton-gateway-and-edm-southeast-offer-little-leeway)