As Tories review election loss, weak support in immigrant communities a crucial issue
2021/10/06 Leave a comment
The Conservative Party is only beginning to sift through the data from the 2021 election, but there is at least one warning light flashing red on the dashboard: the party has been nearly wiped out in Canadian ridings where visible minorities form the majority.
Of the 41 ridings in Canada where more than half the population is racialized, the Conservatives won just one in the 2021 election — Calgary Forest Lawn — despite winning 119 seats overall.
While the Conservatives have never been dominant in vote support among new Canadians, they have at least had a solid footing. In 2019, the party won six of those 41 seats. In 2015, when they were reduced to 99 seats overall, they still won three seats on that list. And when they won a majority in 2011, a whopping 20 of the 41 seats went Conservative (using adjusted borders to account for the 2012 redistricting.)Heading into this year’s election, Conservative MPs had represented some of the heaviest concentrations of racialized voters in the country, including Ontario’s Markham-Unionville (84.6 per cent visible minority in the 2016 census), B.C.’s Richmond Centre (77.8 per cent), and Alberta’s Calgary Skyview (69.5 per cent); all have now flipped Liberal.
Many Conservatives point out they fielded a very diverse slate of candidates in the 2021 election. But the problem is in the final results. For a party trying to form government, being nearly shut out of these ridings is a critical issue to solve.
“If the Conservative Party can’t compete in the suburbs, it’s going to lose,” said Phil Triadafilopoulos, a University of Toronto professor who studied Conservative support in immigrant communities during the Stephen Harper era. “And those suburbs, that’s where immigrants and their children live.”
It appears that a huge number of Chinese Canadians turned against the Conservatives during the 2021 campaign. The reasons are being investigated internally, and many Conservatives believe — including at least one defeated candidate, Kenny Chiu — that there was a deliberate misinformation campaign carried out on Chinese social media apps that wasn’t picked up in time by party headquarters.
But there is also a larger trend over the past decade, and people in the party know it.“Among a lot of new Canadian communities, the party has taken on serious brand damage over the years, and repairing that damage is not something that’s going to happen overnight,” said one Conservative campaign official. There is of course no such thing as a monolithic “ethnic vote” in Canada. It’s split among many different communities, and varies within those communities. Historically, the Conservatives have had their most robust support from some European immigrant communities, such as Ukrainian, Polish, Greek and Italian Canadians.
But in the early years of Harper’s leadership, the Conservatives began a concerted effort to improve their standing in other immigrant communities, particularly among South Asian and East Asian Canadians. They believed the party’s emphasis on low taxes, tough-on-crime laws and family values should find a natural home there.
Famously spearheading this effort was Jason Kenney, who built out a massive network of contacts and kept up a punishing schedule of two dozen events every weekend. The party also paid deep attention to local ethnic media outlets, both in its advertising and in granting interviews.When they won a majority government in 2011, the Conservatives were boosted by a collapsing Liberal Party and an NDP surge. But they also reaped the benefit of earning support among new Canadians. Media reports from the time cite internal party data that put the Conservatives above 40 per cent support among visible minority voters. That number has since plunged. In its post-election polling, Leger found the Conservatives earned 26 per cent support among visible minority voters this year, roughly tied with the NDP. The Liberals were at 39 per cent.
Leger vice-president Andrew Enns, who did internal polling for the Conservative Party during the Harper years, said building and maintaining Conservative support among immigrant communities has always required a committed strategy.“(This support) is not something that comes naturally to the party,” Enns said. He said the individual effect of Kenney has taken on a bit of myth-making over the years, but it still represents a successful larger effort by the party. “It was a very deliberate task that the prime minister set him out to accomplish,” Enns said. “And that hasn’t been replicated, as far as I can see, by the party since then.” Triadafilopoulos said the Conservatives during that time successfully combined a boots-on-the-ground game plan with a strong ideological message.
“(Kenney) had a conscious project of building a conservative ideology, a set of principles, that was also very much conscious of and responding to Canada’s really intense transformation since the late 1960s,” he said. It focused on low taxes, support for entrepreneurs, anti-crime measures, religious freedom and family-oriented policy.“A lot of people in academia saw this as purely cynical vote-grabbing,” Triadafilopoulos said. “There was a degree of that, maybe. But if you parse the speeches, if you listen to what (Kenney) was actually saying…There was a real effort to re-establish the conservative approach and to make it fit with a changing Canada.” Most people who spoke to the National Post, both on and off the record, pointed to the 2015 campaign as a catastrophic setback for the Conservative Party brand among immigrants.
The party pitched a “barbaric cultural practices hotline” that was widely denounced as an anti-immigrant snitch line, and for which numerous Conservative politicians have since apologized. (“It’s why we lost,” said former immigration minister Chris Alexander in 2016, apologizing for his role in announcing the policy.)The Conservatives had also passed a bill to strip Canadian citizenship from dual citizens convicted of a terrorism or treason offence, leading to confusion and concern in immigrant communities that other types of crimes would follow. Justin Trudeau counter-attacked with the line: “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” Balpreet Singh, of the World Sikh Organization of Canada, said that while some Conservative politicians — he singled out Alberta MP Garnett Genuis for particular praise — have worked hard at building bridges, the 2015 campaign still haunts the party.
“They played towards a segment of the electorate that was intolerant,” Singh said. “These things remain in the collective memory.”But Singh didn’t let Erin O’Toole off the hook. He said many Sikhs are keenly aware of the federal parties’ stances on Bill 21, the Quebec law banning public servants from wearing religious symbols. “All the parties have been weak when it comes to Bill 21,” he said. “But the Conservatives were the worst of all the positions. They ruled out a legal intervention and didn’t even come out and say it was discriminatory.” The party’s messaging on China is also under the microscope, given the shocking loss of Richmond Centre, a seat thought to be a safe Conservative riding. A pattern is clear in the 2021 results: Richmond Centre, Markham-Unionville and Steveston-Richmond East all have very high populations of Chinese Canadians — and all flipped from Conservative to Liberal.
Conservative officials strongly suspect they were attacked by misinformation, possibly orchestrated by pro-Beijing groups.“Something weird has happened there that cannot be explained by normal voting patterns,” one party official said, speaking on condition they weren’t named. “We need to find whatever that is. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy kook, but something very strange has happened there.” There may be other factors at play as well. O’Toole’s attempt to attract working class votes has seen a big emphasis on attacking Canada’s trade relationship with China. Slamming the Chinese Communist Party is nothing new for the Conservatives, but O’Toole may not have taken enough care to avoid attacking China as a whole.
Tung Chan, a former Vancouver city councillor and former member of Richmond Centre’s Conservative riding association, said he does believe the party’s China messaging wasn’t careful enough. But he also said the party was not paying enough attention to the misinformation issue.He saw it firsthand during his regular Chinese-language radio appearances during the campaign. Kenny Chiu — the Conservative MP who was defeated in Steveston-Richmond East — had earlier tabled a private member’s bill to set up a registry for agents of foreign governments. “We got tons of calls coming in and almost every single one was afraid of what Kenny Chiu had tabled, and everything that they said was exaggerated, misinformed,” Chan said. “The party did not devote enough resources to try to combat that. Kenny did buy some advertisements, and tried to explain…It wasn’t enough.”
Chan, who was CEO of the immigrant service agency SUCCESS while Kenney was immigration minister, said the party needs to make its ethnic outreach work a top priority again. However, he cautioned against letting it become too focused on one individual’s effort.“They fail to institutionalize it after Jason left, the notion that the party needs support from minority groups,” Chan said. He was very critical of the fact that the word “racism” did not appear once in the Conservative platform this year. Tenzin Khangsar, a Tibetan Canadian who was a chief of staff to Kenney during the Harper years, said the party has a problem when you look at where it’s winning seats right now, but he also expressed optimism.
“The results speak for themselves, but the history speaks for itself too,” he said. “We could get back there. We did it with Harper, we did it with Mulroney. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The playbook is there. The supporters are still there. We just have to work more structured, more strategically, more collaboratively.”
Khangsar argued the Kenney model worked, and can work again.
“We should fully support — with resources and moral and political support from the leader — a lieutenant that will be given the mandate to do what Jason did,” he said. “And that lieutenant should be as important as the Quebec lieutenant, and I say that as a proud former Quebecer.”
The Conservatives are doing an extensive post-election poll, and when those numbers come in over the next few weeks, it may show a more hopeful picture. As O’Toole’s team frequently points out, despite the lower seat count, the party did substantially improve its vote in Ontario from 2019.
Conservative Sen. Yonah Martin, who is Korean Canadian, said she was shocked by the unexpected Conservative losses in Richmond and Markham. She argued, however, that it’s missing the larger picture to focus solely on the seat count when the party put forward such a diverse group of candidates, including three Korean Canadians.
“As a party, we have continued to do outreach, genuine outreach,” she said. “And we do have better diversity within the party membership.”
But she said caucus needs to listen to what some of the defeated candidates have to say, given these losses, and think hard about what needs to change.
“It is disappointing, so this is something we have to look at carefully,” Martin said. “And do things better for the next election, if that’s what it takes.”
Source: As Tories review election loss, weak support in immigrant communities a crucial issue
Multicultural Meanderings 