Foothills voters will have candidates to choose from in the upcoming federal election.
Among them is Kaitte Aurora of the New Democratic Party (NDP).
Prior to their move to Lethbridge, Aurora did mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics work with Arnprior Aerospace and later Lockheed Martin Canada.
For Aurora, a self-described progressive, the NDP was the only real choice, as they found the Liberal and Green parties to lean nearer the middle to even centre-right on many issues.
"There are a lot of things right now in the world that just kind of suck, and I want to try and make them better. I believe that working together, we can fix these issues. We can make them better. We don't have to put up with rising housing costs and our environment being destroyed and our water supply being polluted with selenium and coal dust."
Housing is one of the biggest issues Aurora wants to see addressed.
"We treat housing like a financial asset whose purpose is to make money. The result of that is we pour a lot of money into the quote-unquote 'housing market' with the intention of making sure that that market never decreases in value," said Aurora. "Over the past 40 years that we've been doing this, a pretty significant portion of our overall economy has become dependent on housing. It's now at the point where housing prices are so high that younger generations have more or less been locked out of housing."
The NDP's platform, says Aurora, would see millions of new homes built on public land through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
"We sold off all of our public housing stock, and we stopped building new housing, and house prices have slowly and steadily rose and rose and rose. When you consider that it's compounding year after year, that curve starts to get pretty steep. We're now at that steep part of the curve where housing costs are going up by double-digit percentages every year. So with the NDP, really, what we want to do is we want to restore the role of this CMHC. We want to be able to build public housing on public land, and we want to be able to reverse this trend."
Aurora shares many other Southern Albertans' concerns over coal mining and exploration, though they admit that decisions around that are largely the jurisdiction of the provincial government.
Regarding another aspect of Alberta's energy industry, the NDP candidate would like to see the conversation around renewables shift.
"I get it, oil and gas, they've done a lot for the profits. Alberta is rich because of our natural resources, and we've been able to exploit it, but we also have to recognize that the world is moving away from oil and gas, and with the political instability to our south, it's really accelerating the desire to get away from oil and gas because getting away from oil and gas means getting away from the U.S. and the petrodollar and their dominance. We want to be able to be forward-looking with this and still be able to recognize that there are good jobs in the oil field, and we don't need to lose those jobs while transitioning to renewables. We can keep those same jobs."
Aurora would also like to see Alberta oil put to use in the province by investing in manufacturing and industry.
Another of Alberta's major industries, agriculture, has been the subject of speculation amid U.S. tariffs.
Aurora believes changes to U.S. IP enforcement would be an effective retaliation against the tariffs while simultaneously protecting Alberta's agriculture producers.
"Agriculture is becoming increasingly mechanized, with a lot of it depending now on ultra-high-tech combines with centimetre-level precision over where exactly they are laying down seeds and things like that. These are complex systems that are entirely dependent on American IP. Part of the problem with that is if something goes wrong with one of these systems, we don't really have the right to just repair it. You have to wait for a John Deere rep to come down and insert the software keys so that you can just fix the thing that you could have done anyway. If we stop enforcing American IP laws, then farmers could just fix their own stuff, right? It's how they used to do it."
Border security is another topic that's been recirculating as a result of the tariff situation.
It's an issue Aurora would like to see handled better, and one that they feel would better address Canada's gun control than the federal Liberals' approach.
"Gun control, like it's not really an issue in Canada the same way that it is in the U.S. I think a lot of what the liberals have done is they've been trying to do this performative politics where some bad thing happens in the U.S. and they try to like bring it up here. And it's dumb. I'd really like to see that legislation repealed. The biggest issue we really have with guns is with Americans smuggling guns into Canada. I think it's about something like 90 per cent of gun crime that is committed in Canada is committed by people who do not have a proper license and who are using smuggled weapons."
Given the Foothills riding's history of voting overwhelmingly Conservative, Aurora admits they feel their chances of being elected are low, however, they feel the need to represent progressive voices.
"As amazing as it would be, I'm not really expecting to win. What I'm hoping to do, however, is to rally progressive support. I want to be able to show that there are people here who care, who want to make things better, and who aren't just going to go along with the conservatives because 'That's just what you do.' There are very real issues that are impacting our lives right now that we have the ability to change, and the conservatives will not change things for the better... We can work together to solve our own problems, to make our own lives better. Those are the people who I want to represent."
More information can be seen on Aurora's NDP candidate page, as well as their Reddit profile.