Avni Soma’s mission to flip Conservative-dominated Yellowhead to the NDP is a spicy order. But the Canmore-based scientist, community leader and food advocate says she’s ready for the heat.
Avni Soma is wearing fur-lined mittens, sturdy winter boots and a pompom-adorned toque, pulled down to meet the tortoise shell frames of her oversized glasses. Every breath she expends crystallizes in front of her.
It’s minus 17 degrees Celsius in Hinton, Alberta. But the sun is out and Soma is feeling buoyed by a recent chat with new friends—fellow members of the Indian diaspora whom she noticed at a local restaurant.
“We have a way finding each other,” Soma laughs.
Soma is hoping for similar luck as she knocks on doors, looking to gauge Jasper, Hinton—and later today, December 16, Edson—for support of the federal NDP. There are progressive voters in Yellowhead, the Canmore-based community leader has been assured by the local riding association. But they’re often split between Grits and Dippers. Soma is hopeful that the recent turmoil in Ottawa will turn those red votes orange.
“Things are changing so fast,” she says.
In her life, too. Last week Soma was helping dish out meals at the francophone school in Canmore where her kids are in Grades 1 and 3. Now, on a Meadow Avenue doorstep in the mountain-adjacent mill town, the 50-something-year-old entrepreneur is introducing herself.
“I’m your new federal NDP candidate,” she says to the Hintonite who answers the door of a modest bungalow. “Are you aware of the riding’s federal boundary change?”
This is Soma’s icebreaker. Many don’t realize that Yellowhead’s electoral riding boundaries were redrawn last year to include Banff and Canmore to the south, and Rocky Mountain House, Sundre and Carstairs to the east. Yellowhead still includes the municipal district of Greenview (Grande Cache), but no longer captures Barrhead and Whitecourt.
For Soma, long drives aren’t an issue. In another life she ran an organic farm-to-table food business, and in a venture before that, she distributed chai, based on her family’s recipe, to retailers across Alberta and B.C. She’s also put in big travel days as a pharmaceutical researcher, which is what she studied in university.
“I’m good with long days on the road,” she says. “The car is where I do my thinking.”
These days, what’s she’s ruminating on his how to present herself, politically but also personally. She knows what she’s up against in terms of recent support in Yellowhead for candidates on the left of the political spectrum. But she’s not your typical new democrat, she says. She grew up in the tough community of Dover, in SE Calgary, and moved to the mountains after university, and a divorce.
“I wanted to be a retired white man,” she jokes—her way of saying she was sick of the status quo and its traditional power brokers.
“I realized the only people I was seeing on boards and deciding how the rest of us live were old white guys.”
So she’s diving into politics, and pledging to do her best to meet voters who she’d potentially represent.
Because although there are myriad issues that bubble to the surface in one of the country’s largest federal ridings, what she’s counting on is that others are sick of the status quo, too.
“I think a lot of younger voters are looking for a shift in the hierarchy,” she says.
Find Avni Soma on Instagram and X.
Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com
