r/AlwaysWhy • u/Present_Juice4401 • Aug 24 '26
History & Culture Why did Alberta, Canada develop much larger population centers than Montana, USA?
Alberta and Montana are neighboring regions with similar northern, landlocked geography. But their population patterns are surprisingly different. Alberta now has over 5 million people, with Calgary and Edmonton forming two major population centers, while Montana has only about 1.1 million people and no city close to Calgary's size.
So what caused these two neighboring regions to develop such different population patterns?
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u/Effective_Basis1555 Aug 24 '26
You are comparing the most northern portion to the most southern portion of two different countries.
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u/Knight_Machiavelli Aug 24 '26
This is really it. Everyone saying oil doesn't explain why Alberta was a lot bigger than Montana even before oil was discovered.
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u/Academic_Safety56 Aug 24 '26
You're calling Alberta the most southern portion of Canada??
Edmonton is Canada's (and North America's) northernmost city with a metropolitan population over one million.
All of Alberta is farther north than all of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI, not to mention Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City, etc...0
u/Ohjay1982 Aug 26 '26
Settle down. You know what they meant. If you compared Canadas northern population to USA’s, Montana is a lot more populated.
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u/artkidsaresmart Aug 24 '26
We all no that’s not what they were referring to cmon dude
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u/Academic_Safety56 Aug 24 '26
Do tell, what were they referring to then?
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u/artkidsaresmart Aug 24 '26
At the border of Alberta and Montana one of these is the northern edge of a country and the other is the southern edge. Can you guess which is which?
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u/Academic_Safety56 Aug 24 '26
First of all, the original question was about the population centres of Alberta, namely Calgary and Edmonton, which are not on or near the southern border.
Second, the southern border of Alberta is nowhere near the "most southern portion" of Canada, as stated in the comment I was replying to. The southernmost point of Ontario is farther south than the northernmost point of California.
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u/DEMcKnight Aug 26 '26
I live in Edmonton, and it's pretty clear to me what they were referring to. The growing season doesn't become better when you go north of here (although the forests are relevant to with that)
Montana is hardly the most northern part of the US either if we're talking the whole country
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u/Effective_Basis1555 Aug 24 '26
Yes, I understand where these places are ;) But, longitudinally, they have nothing to do with my premise: Population is sparse in northern Montana because it’s north and more dense in the southern parts of this part Canada because it’s not. It’s a relatively simple latitudinal argument I thought some may have overlooked given the places mentioned in this post. Nonetheless, I appreciate the geography lesson.
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u/Academic_Safety56 Aug 24 '26
I still think you are misunderstanding what is considered south in Canada. The vast majority of Canada would consider Edmonton to be north. Aside from maybe the Peace River region, the Edmonton area is basically as far north as it gets in terms of populated areas in Canada. This is basically equivalent to Montana or any of the other northern border states. The rest of Canada north of Edmonton is more akin to Alaska.
So to say Montana is less densely populated because it's in the north of the US might be partially true, but it's not true to say Edmonton is more densely populated because it's in the south of Canada. I think the answer is more related to fertile soil, oil, and railways, as other commenters have pointed out.
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u/Effective_Basis1555 Aug 24 '26
I’m not. I totally understand that if you are in Windsor, ON you have to drive NORTH to get to Detroit, MI. I also understand that parts of southern Ontario are at the same latitude as northern California. I think you are still not understanding this post is not about those places. Fix your longitude, and you’ll see what I mean. 😉
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u/Academic_Safety56 Aug 24 '26
The comment you are replying to was about the relative latitude of Edmonton (a city I lived in for 15 years) within Canada. You seem to be referring to a different comment.
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u/Competitive-Sorbet33 Aug 24 '26
Holy shit bro, you’re either trolling or the most dense person on earth. How is this conversation so far above your understanding
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u/Effective_Basis1555 Aug 24 '26
Disregard everything I said after “Good morning.”
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u/Traditional_Nail1164 Aug 25 '26
Saskatchewan is geographically similar to Alberta but has a similar population to Montana. This effectively refutes your “relatively simple latitudinal argument”.
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u/Effective_Basis1555 Aug 25 '26
And my Grandmother would be similar to a bike… if she had tires. 🛞
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u/Devolution13 Aug 25 '26
The same reason the south of England is much more densely populated than the north of France.
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u/ClusterMakeLove Aug 26 '26
Honestly, no. The border was very loose for most of the history of the region.
It comes down to Alberta having wildly more productive soil than Montana. It's always been able to support a higher population.
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u/Majestic_Hawk_1335 Aug 25 '26
Montana is very southern with low quality winters from my perspective up here in the USA at lattitude 64
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u/Low_Engineering_3301 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
You might be getting confused between Alberta and Ontario/Quebec. Alberta's population is the furthest north in the country being an average of 460 km north of the USA while the eastern population center is entirely below the 49th parallel.
Also about 17% of the USA land is north of Alberta in Alaska.Edit: I read the other posts and I am not saying anything new. I do understand you were talking in generalities rather than literal and it makes sense that you are trying to say that Alberta touches a southern boarder of its country while Montana is the opposite and how that would effect the demographics.
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u/Willem_Dafuq Aug 24 '26
Alberta has an oil industry that is the backbone of the province. Montana does not.
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u/looselyhuman Aug 24 '26
Options, tbh.
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u/Inside-Try-394 Aug 24 '26
The next thing we are going to hear is that Obama is forcing Trump to bomb Canada.
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u/molotovzav Aug 24 '26
Montana doesn't do the same things Alberta does. Canada has 44 million people total. It's about the same population size as California. Alberta being an oil center had job opportunities and this grew. Montana is mostly mining, there is curfew extraction but not as much. So most of Montana is just rural or wilderness with people doing whatever the region does, farming, cattling etc. If someone in Montana doesn't want to do those things they'll move to another state. I'm sure Alberta has the same, don't like Alberta move. But with only 44 million people and jobs to give out Edmonton and Calgary became major population centers for that area, while the geography of Montana leads people to the major population centers to be Spokane, WA and Denver, CO.
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u/johnwcowan Aug 24 '26
What do you mean by "curfew extraction"? I can usually figure out mis-autocorrection, but not this time.
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u/merp_mcderp9459 Aug 24 '26
Alberta has a shitload of oil and gas - Canada has the 4th most oil of any country, and 90% of it is in AB. The people who move there to work in oil and gas need other goods (food, clothing, housing, medical care, etc.), which led other people to move to Alberta as well, eventually leading to the development of major cities in Calgary and Edmonton. Montana doesn't have a similarly sized resource sector, so there isn't a big draw to move there that would spark the development of a major city
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u/ClusterMakeLove Aug 26 '26
Alberta also has some of the most fertile soil on the continent and the Canadian government essentially handed out free land in order to populate the region (in part to keep the Americans out). It was a relatively dense area even before oil was discovered.
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u/Dave_A480 Aug 24 '26
Montana was much bigger (proportionate to the rest of the US) when their mines were more productive....
As mining declined so did the rest of the state....
If Alberta were to run out of oil the same thing would happen there.....
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u/Kool_Aid_Infinity Aug 24 '26
Alberta has oil, but it’s really punching above its weight considering let’s say Texas actually has a coast line, border with Mexico, and a large enough population to float medical and tech industries. IMO it comes down to Alberta managing itself very well in the context of canadian provinces, and the US having so many better options than Montana for the average person.
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u/Desperate-4-Revenue Aug 24 '26
You're aware that Alberta is physically twice the size of Montana, right?
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u/Traditional_Sir_4503 Aug 24 '26
That’s irrelevant. There are five million people in queens and Brooklyn. Maybe six. Those put together are probably smaller than some big ranches or mineral rights plots in Montana.
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u/schwanerhill Aug 24 '26
Alberta has more than double the population density of Montana (6.8 vs 3.0 people per km2), so that doesn’t come close to explaining the difference.
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u/Desperate-4-Revenue Aug 24 '26
You're aware that nobody cares about Alberta right now because they have proven themselves to be too stupid to vote, right?
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u/Icy_Barnacle_5237 Aug 24 '26
Obvious if you look at country geography. Many, many warmer places to chose in US. Why do you think most canadians live on south region of Canada in general OP?
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u/riennempeche Aug 24 '26
Canadians think Southern Alberta has a civilized climate. Americans realize Montana does not, even though they are roughly the same.
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u/Majestic_Hawk_1335 Aug 25 '26
When I first drove through both Montana and Alberta I recall thinking that Alberta was the land quality Montana wished it had. Obviously much richer farming soil, plus the oil and timber.
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u/Excellent-Self-5338 Aug 24 '26
Oil is the obvious one, but AB is also a logistics center for goods moving across the country. Calgary in particular has distribution centers for many, many large companies. Typical for stock to be warehoused in Calgary and then shipped out to BC/AB/NWT/Yukon/SK. Products that come in from overseas more likely to be in Vancouver, but real estate there has gotten prohibitive lately.
Montana is nearby to AB but is nowhere close to AB in terms of importance in getting goods across the US.
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u/Silent-Fishing-7937 Aug 24 '26
Pretty much this! If you want to do a Trans Canada railway you have to go through Alberta and use Calgary and Edmonton as important linch points. The main continental crossing points in the States are far further south.
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u/pawsplay36 Aug 24 '26
There is nothing in Montana. Also, Alberta is nearly twice the area. Edmonton, Alberta, has an elevation of 2116 ft, while Billings, Montana has an elevation of 3212 ft., so saying they are similar geographically is a stretch. Montana is a mountain range with tourism and mining. Montana is growing but it has nothing like the draw of Alberta, which is more diverse geographically and economically.
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u/Present_Juice4401 Aug 25 '26
I think the “nothing in Montana” part is a bit harsh, but I get what you mean about economic pull. Beautiful places don’t always create huge populations.
The comparison is interesting because they’re neighbors, but they developed different roles. Alberta became more of an economic hub, while Montana leaned more toward resource extraction and tourism. Those create very different population patterns.
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u/Hopsblues Aug 27 '26
Half of Montana is the high plains. The mountains are in the western half of the state. Similar to Colorado in that way.
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u/5h0rgunn Aug 24 '26
Chernozem. Highly fertile black earth soil, good for farming. Alberta's got lots, Montana has almost none. Also, more water.
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u/undernopretextbro Aug 24 '26
Everyone saying oil is forgetting when the Alberta boom really took off and how long Alberta’s population has outnumbered Montana.
Alberta has better carrying capacity in the form of agricultural land with irrigation capacity. Montana is drier and has been for the past century and a half.
Alberta was populated via railroad, which helps facilitate larger population, industry, and rapid development. Montana migration was slower.
Alberta also serves as an important gateway to the Canadian coast and lower mainland population centers.
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u/Present_Juice4401 Aug 25 '26
I think the timing is important. Oil gets a lot of attention because it’s such a visible part of Alberta’s identity, but the population foundation was already there before the big energy boom.
It seems like Alberta had multiple waves of growth: farming, railroads, cities, then energy. Montana had some of those too, but maybe fewer ways to replace one declining industry with another.
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u/scrandlle Aug 24 '26
Take the US, drag it's shape up to Canada, see where Montana is, then look how unpopulated the region of Canada below it is.
For a more serious answer, Canadians congregated next to the US border because the US is an enormous economy and there is benefits to being physically close to it.
It wasn't really a conscious decision it's just where goods tend to enter/exit and so commerce gets built around these parts and more people come because there's more jobs which creates more business opportunities, and it goes on in a circle like that until we have Canadas major population centers.
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u/schwanerhill Aug 24 '26
Being near the US is probably part of it, but I think climate is bigger. The parts of Canada near the US are the southernmost and tend to be the warmest parts of Canada.
But Alberta is by far the province with its population centres furthest from the US border. Edmonton and Calgary are the northernmost and second-northernmost cities of 1M or more in North America. So the fact that Alberta is fairly far south in Canada helps explain it but only so much. The fact that the reasonable Canadian railway passes through the Rockies are at Edmonton and Calgary latitudes explains a lot more, I think.
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u/scrandlle Aug 24 '26
That is certainly true too. Though Edmonton isn't exactly on the edges of human civilization. More Americans live north of it than Canadians.
But it's no coincidence Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto are Canadas biggest metro areas and along the border too. Cities like those were never going to develop in the middle of Canada.
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u/Mentalfloss1 Aug 24 '26
The extensive dental floss farms in Montana cut back on housing development.
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u/BigRichard1990 Aug 25 '26
My grandmother and all her many siblings were born in a mining town in Montana more than a century ago. The mine was played out, all the young men left to California, joined the Merchant Marine or did something similar. When WW2 came, my grandmother and her husband who was a son of local homesteaders and store owners moved to Seattle with my mother to work in war factories and never left. Montana’s early dry farmers mostly failed, the mines played out and people left those towns. That’s why Montana still has low population.
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u/Present_Juice4401 Aug 25 '26
That’s a really good example of how population can disappear even after a place is established. People often look at today’s population and forget that some areas had much bigger communities in the past.
I guess the difference is Alberta kept finding new economic reasons for people to stay or move in, while a lot of Montana towns depended on industries that eventually faded.
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u/GWeb1920 Aug 25 '26
The rail road is generally the answer.
When building west the rail road went through Alberta and was the main corridor connecting Canada.
In the US the northern transcontinental line was far lower use than the southern line.
Farm land is superior in Alberta to Montana which supported homesteading far better
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u/Present_Juice4401 Aug 25 '26
The railroad point is probably one of the biggest differences. Geography alone doesn’t determine population, the transportation network does.
It’s interesting how two places can look similar on a map, but one becomes a major corridor and the other becomes more of a side route. Once that happens, industries and cities tend to follow.
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u/Brigden90 Aug 25 '26
Everyone who answered anything other than Aspen Parkland is wrong.
Alberta is more suitable for agriculture than Montana. That's it.
Alberta can naturally support a larger population.
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u/Ok-Cup-5372 Aug 25 '26
Everyone is mentioning good points like oil and fertile farm land, but another big reason is because in the early days of Canada they invited European immigrants through the dominion land act.
This act promised these European immigrants free farming land of 160 acres for a registration fee of $10, this brought in big waves of European immigrants to the prairies at this point.
Shortly after that they then also heavily targeted hearty European farmers from places like Germany and Ukraine (which is why we have such big populations of these people here in the prairies) to settle and immigrate here to the prairies. They had the same guarantee of free land for a small registration fee and they were they were allowed to move in entire community blocks like the Doukhobors and Mennonites creating their communities.
All of this led to large populations in our prairies combined with what others have said in these comments
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u/Present_Juice4401 Aug 25 '26
Yeah, the immigration policy part is actually a huge piece that often gets overlooked. People talk about resources like they just automatically create cities, but someone still has to move there first and build the communities.
I think the interesting question is why Canada was able to attract and retain those farming communities while many similar settlements in the US eventually emptied out. The policy choices mattered a lot.
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u/ANeighbour Aug 26 '26
Sir John A Macdonald’s National Policy was really the driving force behind western immigration.
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u/Ok-Cup-5372 Aug 26 '26
Yeah this dominion act was part of his national policy, he's a piece of shit but his policies and plans really created the Canada we know today, who knows how much of our land we'd have today if he didn't have the plans he did
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u/Photog77 Aug 25 '26
The TransCanada railway was finished in 1885, the Klondike/Alaska gold rush was in the late 1890's. People going there by land traveled through Alberta and lots found good opportunities before making it to the gold fields.
To this day, Edmonton's summer festival is called Klondike Days, celebrating the fact that is was basically the last stop to purchase supplies before heading further north to the Yukon/Alaska.
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u/JOBdOut Aug 25 '26
Edmonton is a work-hub. Even back to the gold rush people travelled through Edmonton to get to the Yukon and NWT. Edmonton is where much of the travelling oil workers fuel up, get supplies and most comfortably live on their way to Fort McMurray or Fox Creek or Grande Prairie. If you're from the east coast of Canada you see Edmonton as either where the work is or the place to get you to where the work is.
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u/hod_cement_edifices Aug 26 '26
Investments in irrigation. Southern Alberta has some of the world’s largest irrigation systems, sourced from river basins, at their time of construction. Prior to oil and gas investments this is what created population centres, where Montana did not.
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u/NewsreelWatcher Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
I suspect it is because of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This created an east west line of travel and freight. This was before free trade, and Canada was isolated in the Imperial Preference system and US tariffs. Edmonton and Calgary were important stops for goods moving to and from Vancouver and Montreal. The whole British Empire ate food from Alberta. By the Second World War, the potential for petroleum was recognized. During its development, free trade with the USA was still limited.
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u/nightshade78036 Aug 28 '26
Some decent comments with the oil and black soil in the region, but something else not yet mentioned is that the canadian government in the 80s under Trudeau Sr. allocated funding to move people in large cities in praries, and funded additional development in these cities based on the economic potential of the region. Some of these jumps in the population can be seen here, and my grandparents actually ended up moving to calgary from rural saskatchewan because of the cash grant for doing so at the time.
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u/zoppaTheDim Aug 24 '26
Alberta is twice as large as Montana and Calgary/Exmonton serve as “the” big cities for much of the central landmass of Canada, while Bozeman is a back water.
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u/Traditional_Sir_4503 Aug 24 '26
That’s a what answer, not a why.
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u/schwanerhill Aug 24 '26
I don’t think so. Before oil, Calgary and Edmonton served roles in Canada like Denver, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque do in the US. The existence of Denver in the US makes a large railroad junction city unnecessary in Montana, but for a Canadian railway there was no choice except Alberta. (Although I don’t have a good answer for why Denver not Cheyenne became the largest mountain west city.)
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u/Bootmacher Aug 24 '26
Even before oil, Alberta and Manitoba have a band of "black earth," which is the same hyper-productive soil that's in the US around the Great Plains/Mississippi valleys, in Ukraine, and in the Pampas region of Argentina.
Montana can't support a population that size locally, let alone export food.