In the far west end of Vancouver, where the city streets give way to the towering trees of Pacific Spirit Park, you will find the well-established riding of Vancouver Quadra.
Residential neighbourhoods filled with long time families who moved in before the Vancouver real estate boom are side-by-side with new wealth and student sublets. The sought after neighbourhoods of West Point Grey, Dunbar-Southlands, Kerrisdale, Arbutus Ridge, and the west end of Kitsilano are all represented here. Gentrification and densification have exploded the population of this riding over the past 20 years, but multi-million dollar homes still dominate large parts of this riding. The demographics of Canada can all be witnessed here: multi-generational Canadians, newcomers, and a strong Indigenous presence all fit within its 42 square kilometres.
The Great Hall of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, on Musqueam territory. Photo: Xicotencatl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Continue west through winding forest paths and you will eventually stumble your way onto the UBC campus, on a point far above the Salish Sea. It is a place where the old and the new sit side by side: the Museum of Anthropology with its house posts, the UBC Botanical Garden with its quiet forest glades (where Matt and I were married) and 60,000 students streaming into UBC daily to achieve their academic dreams. All of this sitting on the unceeded territory of the Musqeaum people, whose reservation sits between Dunbar and UBC.
Quadra is one of the most credentialed ridings in the country where more than two in three working-age adults here hold a university degree (67%, 4th of 343), and the reason is not hard to find. The university is the largest entity in the riding, and the neighbourhoods east of the campus are where its faculty, its graduates, and many of Vancouver’s professional class have settled. It is also a globally connected place. Close to four in ten residents were born outside Canada, and nearly three in ten are of Chinese heritage, a community generations deep on Vancouver’s west side. Almost half of households rent rather than own (46%), many of them students and young professionals cycling through the towers near campus and along the Broadway corridor. This mixture is not just something the census records; in 2025 the riding sent it to Ottawa.
Wade Grant won Vancouver Quadra for the Liberals, and became the first member of the Musqueam Nation to sit in the House of Commons, elected to represent the very land his community has never ceded.
Grant is of Musqueam and Chinese descent, a lineage that reads like a map of the riding itself. He came to Parliament by way of the Musqueam council, a stretch advising British Columbia premier Christy Clark, and years as the band’s intergovernmental affairs officer. Currently, Grant sits as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change. A riding built on Musqueam territory, and home to a large and long-established Chinese-Canadian community, chose a man who belongs to both.
Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.
The electoral math almost comes second here, which is itself the point. Quadra is Liberal ground and has been for many years, and in 2025 it only hardened. Grant took 63% of the vote, more than 30 points clear of the Conservative candidate, Ken Charko. The story was the one that ran through much of the country: the New Democrat vote collapsed here, from nearly 20% to barely 4%, and moved to a Liberal Party under Mark Carney that read, to the riding at least, as the safe choice. Based on these numbers the model reads Vancouver Quadra as SAFE, a near-certain Liberal hold. An educated, immigrant-heavy, urban riding is about as dependable a Liberal coalition as any within Canada.
The UBC campus can feel like a place apart and away from the rest of City of Vancouver. The riding around the campus tells a story that is distinctly more Canadian: the oldest claim to the land and the newest arrivals to the country, voting together, and, for the first time, represented by someone who carries both.
Stay curious,
Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project
Edited by Matt
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