After months of campaigning to get people from Ontario to move to Alberta with targeted billboards, online ads and inescapable subway posters, it seems the prairie province's efforts are paying off.

New numbers from one of the nation's top real estate brokerages shows that far more people have been looking up available real estate in Canada's middle, particularly in the cities of Edmonton and Calgary.

Ontario is too expensive, every day a new "surprise"

— Gilson Junior (@gilsonjuniorpro) June 28, 2022

Based on Royal LePage data from the first six months of this year, searches for homes in the former Alberta locale have quadrupled, and in the latter, more than doubled since 2019.

This is, of course, largely due to the key selling points the province has been touting to people struggling to survive in exorbitantly priced Toronto, especially as mortgage interest rates and the overall cost of living continue to rise: cheap housing and job prospects.

The Alberta is Calling promotion notes that the average cost of a new home there is less than half of what you would pay in Ontario or B.C. — about $420,000, the government says — while the province has the highest average wages, the lowest tax rate and hundreds of thousands of job openings.

While people in Edmonton and Calgary see "bigger paycheques and smaller rent cheques," in the words of their leadership, searches for homes there now comprise 2 per cent and 1.9 per cent, respectively, of all home searches on royallepage.ca.

Though these numbers seem small, it makes the centres the two top-searched cities on the platform, both last year and so far this year. Meanwhile, people have been fleeing Ontario in droves for the last few years.

Gross. Toronto culture is a global envy. You wanna exchange that for cowboy country then I say don’t let the door hit you in the a** on the way out.

— RichardOnHuron (@RichardDuHuron) March 15, 2023

"Amid higher interest rates and rising property prices, more affordable cities like Edmonton and Calgary have become increasingly appealing to homebuyers," the firm says.

"As online searches for Alberta’s largest cities have increased online, data from Statistics Canada shows that interprovincial migration to the province has also increased in recent years, with more than 21,000 net new residents moving to Alberta in 2021-2022 from elsewhere in Canada."